Sep 12 2017
:
The Times of India
(NaviMumbai)
A Scholarship For Everyone
Geeta Gandhi Kingdon
Why school vouchers are the
best way to give India's children access to quality education
The Times of India has
launched a generous scholarship for 400 students to access quality
higher education “to nurture the next genera
tion of APJ Abdul Kalams“. Laudable as such benefactions are, to achieve
scale against our teeming population young people's opportunity to
access good education and achieve their potential should not depend on
philanthropy , but be the duty of a responsible and just government.
The way of giving government funding can alter the fortunes of India's
children. Specifically , direct benefit transfer (DBT) or school voucher
to parents would be a scholarship to every eligible child, enabling
himher to attend any school of their choice whose fee is upto the
monetary value specified on the voucher.
Equally importantly ,
voucher funding would make India's lax government schools and teachers
more accountable by linking a school's funding (and thus teacher
salaries) to its ability to attract and retain children.
Under
the current funding structure, far from retaining children, government
elementary schools have been emptying at an alarming rate: official DISE
data show that between 2011 and 2016, total enrolment in government
schools fell by 13 million and that in private schools rose by 17.5
million. This exodus has rendered many government schools pedagogically
and economically unviable, with 40% of all government schools now having
fewer than 50 students in total! Under DBT, the government gives a
voucher a promissory note of a given monetary value, to the parent
of each eligible child. If the voucher is fixed at, say, Rs 500 per
month, the parent can admit their child in any school that charges fees
up to that amount, but she can also supplement the voucher from her own
pocket to avail a higher fee school, if she so wishes. Parents can
choose any type of institution, ie private, aided or government school.
Many countries have used school
vouchers to good effect, eg Colombia, Chile, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, US, etc. Under a universal DBT scheme, all children are
eligible for a school voucher, while under a targeted scheme, only
designated groups would be eligible, eg children of `economically weaker
sections'.
This kind of public scholarship to children is a
radically different way of funding education. Presently government grant
goes directly to schools, but under a voucher scheme it would go
indirectly to schools via parents. Secondly , vouchers represent a
per-student grant to schools, rather than the current `block grant'
whereby each government-funded school gets a lump sum (usually equal to
its total teacher-salary bill) irrespective of the number of children in
the school which is a major cause of inefficiency .
The power
of vouchers is that a voucher-bearing parent, like a fee-paying parent,
can hold the school accountable because she has the power to deprive the
school of its revenue by taking her child
(and thus the voucher) away to a different school, if she is
dissatisfied with the quality effort of a school. Under voucher funding,
schools are compelled to compete with each other to attract children,
and thus have to give good results.
A voucher scheme can also be
made an agent of greater equity in education, with the voucher value
being set inverse to family income, ie with poorer children getting
higher value vouchers, instead of a uniform voucher value for all
children.
The government has two main objections to DBT in
education. The first is its belief that in backward rural areas private
schools will not come up, even with the
lure of government voucher funding.However, this fear is unfounded.
National Sample Survey data 2014-15 show that median fee in private
unaided elementary schools was Rs 292 pm in rural and Rs 542 pm in urban
India, and that 25% children in unaided schools of India paid a `total
course fee' of less than Rs 200 pm (57% paid less than Rs 500 pm, 82%
paid less than Rs 1,000 pm and a mere 3.6% paid more than Rs 2,500 pm).
Given that 25% private school managers charge less than Rs 200 pm, even a
relatively low value voucher of Rs 500 pm will represent untold riches
in remote rural areas, and is likely to produce a strong supply-side
response.
MHRD's second problem with DBT funding of schools is
that the many emptying government schools with their few enrolled
students would get too little revenue under voucher funding to pay
their current teachers. Here, the central government and many state
governments are already contemplating school `consolidation', ie merging
the tiny government schools with bigger government schools nearby , and
redeploying teachers from underenrolled to over-enrolled schools.
While in the transition phase there may be a glut of teachers to be
paid above the voucher revenue, with natural wastage (retirement), the
problem will disappear over time. Another solution may be to set a
different voucher amount for government schools and a different one for
private schools since government schools' per pupil expenditure in
2017-18 is around Rs 2,500 pm in primary and Rs 3,300 pm in
upper-primary classes (see Tamil Nadu's July 2017 gazette), which is
several times the median private school fee level.
Knotty
problems require bold solutions. Tinkering at the edges of the system is
simply not going to improve the quality of schooling, nor will the
provision of good inputs (infrastructure and trained staff) do the job.
The elephant in the room is school and teacher accountability , and DBT
voucher funding tackles that while also providing a scholarship to all
the children of India.
(The writer is Chair of Education Economics, University College, London)
Source : http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31840&articlexml=A-Scholarship-For-Everyone-12092017014032#
