Several untrained teachers continue to teach; some schools lack basic infrastructure, and school managements openly conduct admission tests to screen students and demand exorbitant capitation fee — all this in violation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act.
Wednesday will mark five years since the Act was implemented, and yet, several provisions continue to remain on paper. While the government has introduced Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) method to break away from learning by rote, the benefits are yet to trickle down to classrooms.
The Central Act lists out several aspects for school managements to comply with in order to ensure quality education. But five years on, educational experts have criticised the government for focusing only on 25 per cent reservation for children from weak and disadvantaged group in private schools.
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Ambarish Rai, national convener of the RTE Forum, said the government has not paid attention to other pressing issues such as training of teachers and fulfilling basic infrastructure. As per the District Information System for Education 2014–2015 report, only 36.52 per cent of the 44,295 elementary schools across the State have fulfilled all infrastructure criteria as mandated in the Act.
Some of these include separate toilets for boys and girls, playgrounds and a library. The deadline for this ended on March 31, 2013 but the State government has not penalised erring schools.
Mr. Rai pointed out that the quality of teachers also needed immediate attention. The deadline for recruiting trained teachers ended on Tuesday, but several private schools have untrained teachers. In an attempt to usher in quality in teacher recruitment, the State government introduced the Teacher’s Eligibility Test. But, only 6.6 per cent of the 3.86 lakh candidates passed the test.
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Mr. Rai said majority of the teacher training institutions were private ones. The posts of 32, 888 teachers is vacant in government elementary schools across the State and the department officials say that there is a shortage of teachers, who have qualified this test and are eligible to teach in primary schools. After 2009, the government will now call for applications to conduct CET in May for recruitment of teachers. No action has been initiated against the identified 1,266 unauthorised schools in Bengaluru, even though section 18 of the Act says that running schools without permission is illegal.
Compared to other States, Karnataka is far ahead in implementation of the reservation quota. In the coming years, we will focus on implementing other provisions of the ActMohammad Mohsin,Commissioner for Public Instruction