Article 25A, inserted as part of the 18th Amendment, states: “The state shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such manner as may be determined by law.”
So, we need a law for making 25A operational, but that law, it seems on a non-lawyer reading of 25A, is about the manner of giving this education, and it is not about its ambit or about it being a basic right now.
The words ‘free’ and ‘compulsory’ have implications too, but I have written on these before. For this article, I want to focus on a different implication of 25A. The one about minimum standards and how to measure them.
When the state is promising education to every child, clearly implicit in the promise is an assumption or understanding of what that education would consist of. And, equally clearly the concept of this education will need to stipulate some ‘minimum’ threshold that would have to be met or crossed to qualify for being called ‘education’. So, 25A is not a right about access alone. It is that, but it is, quite strongly, a promise on quality. A child who is in school but where the teacher does not show up or where the child does not learn anything is not getting an education and hence is in contravention of the promise of 25A.
If the government is serious about implementing 25A, and it should be as 25A has conferred a basic right on children between 5-16 years, apart from the fact that it makes functional sense for Pakistan to invest in its children as well, the government has to commit to a process that ensures a) all children should be getting an education, and b) this education should satisfy the basic ‘standards’ that we need from education.
All participants of a dialogue on education reform, that brought some 30 odd academics, politicians, bureaucrats, civil-society members, journalists, and donor representatives working on or interested in education issues in Pakistan at Kennedy School at Harvard, for a two-day event sponsored by South Asia Initiative (SAI), Harvard, Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), Pakistan, felt, among other things, that the operationalisation of 25A, apart from new laws to make implementation possible, and new administrative procedures, also requires work on a) stipulation of minimum standards of what education is supposed to be, and b) ways of measuring whether children are reaching those standards or not, and c) sharing the information on achievement/performance with parents and policymakers to allow for better informed decision-making and feedback.
But this is a lot of work. What is being said above implies a lot. Since the 18th Amendment also led to devolution of education, as a subject, to provinces, it is the provincial governments that have to now set the relevant standards for education for all children in the province. And then they have to ensure, through implementation, measurement and feedback, that those standards are being met by all providers, private and public, of education.
It is not the case that the provincial governments are not cognizant of the fact. They are. And there are some moves, in some provinces, in this direction as well. For example, Punjab has already stipulated that all school children, irrespective of provider, should be taking public examinations. And Punjab Examination Commission (PEC) has been working on the issue of province wide exams. There are moves in other provinces on these lines as well, but we need a lot more systematic work.
The provinces need to stipulate the minimum standards of reading, writing, arithmetic, and other areas that are considered to be important. These stipulations will be useless if there is no way of checking if every child, across each province, is achieving these minimums. And since we have both private and public providers of education, it really means measuring the performance of each child.
There are many issues with standardised testing, and even in places like the US, where standardised testing has been there, in one form or another, for quite some time, there are plenty of critics of the approach: testing tends to be narrow, there can be issues of teaching to tests, it encourages competition and can encourage corruption, it distorts teacher rewards/incentives to a disproportional weight for student performance in tests, it lowers the importance of non-tangibles in educational experiences and many other concerns.
Any exercise in testing will have to deal with these issues. But that is exactly the place where we have to be. The dialogue was a first step in the direction of this conversation. Some of the participants at the dialogue showed a lot of interest in the issue. As did some politicians and the bureaucrats who were participating in the dialogue. We are hoping that with the many colleagues who were not at the dialogue but have been working on these issues in Pakistan and/or have an interest in these issues, we can take the dialogue further and develop the relevant research and policy related work that is needed to take the necessary steps towards the operationalisation of 25A, as an effective basic right.
The implementation of 25A is not going to be easy or swift. It will require very serious commitment from the state and society of the country, and not just in financial terms but on many fronts. It will also require a lot of very serious work in terms of development of requisite laws and administrative procedures, new institutions and/or reorganisation, need for coordination at the national level, and reorganisation at provincial and lower levels also. In this article, we have just taken up one issue, that of minimum quality stipulation and its operationalisation, to highlight one discussion that was recently held and that highlighted this as one of the urgent issues that need to be taken up. We hope these and all relevant issues, for making 25A a reality in as short a time as possible, can be taken up in Pakistan with the urgency that they deserve.
The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at fbari@sorosny.org