Former MP M. Ramadass has called for the constitution of a separate board for school education to lift the Union Territory from the appalling rankings in the latest School Education Quality Index (SEQI) released by NITI Aayog.
In a statement, Mr. Ramadass pointed out that Puducherry was a poor performer with a low score of only 42.98% in SEQI. It was developed through a collaborative process including the Ministry of Human Resource Development, State Governments and World Bank.
Puducherry ranked 4th among the seven Union Territories, 9th among 15 small States and Union Territories and 25th among 35 States and Union Territories.
This was a reflection of poor performance across SEQI parameters including outcomes, governance processes aiding outcomes, attendance, teacher and administrative adequacy, training, accountability and transparency and access, equity and learning outcomes as measured by the average score in classes 3, 5 and 8 in language and mathematics. The SEQI had assessed the performance of States and UTs on a score of 100 for the year 2016-17 and also changes in performance over the previous year.
Dismal picture
According to Mr. Ramadass, it was “alarming” that the difference in the performance score between Chandigarh and Puducherry was about 40 points. Further Puducherry lagged behind Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur, Jharkand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand which are more backward and are not as prominent as Puducherry in the educational map of India. “This dismal picture is quite surprising, shocking and unexpected, especially in the backdrop of several new positive measures initiated by the Government of Puducherry to tone up the quality of school education and high success rates in X and XII public examinations,” Mr. Ramadass said.
However, a deeper disaggregated category and domain wise analysis reveals the underlying factor for poor quality education of Puducherry which needs to be addressed seriously.
The performance of Puducherry in outcomes (45%) and governance (38.22%) categories is just less than average. He pointed to the fact that among the four domains constituting outcomes category, Puducherry had fared well in access and equity aspects securing a score of 78% and 68% respectively.
In the sphere of infrastructure also the performance is reasonably good (about 50%). But in the matter of learning outcome which assumes more than 50% of weightage in the outcome category, Puducherry has done very badly obtaining just only 20%. The learning outcome score of Chandigarh is about 100%. Puducherry ranks 30th among 35 States and UTs in learning outcome.
This low score and ranking have pulled down the aggregate outcome performance and the overall quality index of Puducherry.
The low learning outcome is caused probably by the low foundational literacy and numeracy found among the schoolchildren which implies that even after passing a particular stage of education, students have not developed the ability to read and write and to perform basic operations with numbers. Mr. Ramadass urged the Chief Minister, who often boasts of high achievement of the UT on the education front, to really ponder over this data-based appalling performance of Puducherry, and educational administrators and government school teachers to seriously introspect on this worrying facet and address it immediately.
Redesign curriculum
The government should radically redesign all curriculum to give the students a sound foundation in reading, writing, speaking, mathematicalreasoning, problem solving , he said.
