Prioritisation needed
Annual Status of Education (ASER) report 2011, released recently, while talking of reading ability in Urdu/Sindhi, says: “Class wise analysis of reading ability show that only 41.2 percent of Class 3 students were able to read sentences, while, nearly 83 percent could not read a story.” Pg. 71. If we move to English, the findings get much worse. Only 13.1 percent of Class 3 children were able to read sentences fluently and, amazingly, 29 percent of those who could read sentences did so without understanding any meaning.
The ASER survey was across 80 plus districts of Pakistan and tested almost 140,000, mostly rural, children. So, the findings are quite representative and general. It is true that, on average, children enrolled in private schools perform a little better than those in government schools, the overall numbers, for all, are bad and even in private schools only 53.3 percent of enrolled children could read Urdu/Sindhi sentences, compared to 37.5 percent of children in government schools.
Article 25A, added to the Constitution under the 18th Constitutional Amendment, recognises the right to free and compulsory education, for all children of the ages of 5-16 years, as a basic right. It will be, beginning April, two years since this Amendment has been passed. There has been little or no progress in implementing this Amendment and extending this right. More than 15 million, only a little less than the population of Karachi, 5-16 year olds, remain out of school in the country. And equally importantly, if not more so, the quality of education that we are imparting to the children who are fortunate enough to be able to make it to schools, across the board, is quite poor. Will this prepare the youth of the country for the future? Will this allow Pakistan to go down the development path with leaps and bounds? Will this education system produce the active and informed citizenry in Pakistan that we need? The answer is clearly no.
Although school education was mostly a provincial subject, by removing the subject of education from the concurrent list, the 18th Amendment has made it completely so. Whether the federal government bears some responsibility for implementation of 25A or not, and whether the financial implications of 25A are shared between the federal and provincial governments, though important concerns, are not the issue here. The main point is that it is now going to be the provincial governments who are going to be wholly responsible for educational provision in their domains. So, it is provincial policies that we have to look to in order to understand the priorities of the government. And if we look at these policies, especially since the passing of the 18th Amendment, the situation does not look too promising.
To take one example, the more well known educational initiatives of the Punjab, over the last few years, have been Daanish Schools, educational scholarship schemes, distribution of laptops, the formation and operationalisation of the Punjab Education Commission (PEC) and some initiatives of Punjab Education Foundation (PEF). Daanish Schools, though they have been touted as a major breakthrough in thinking and in efforts to provide ‘quality’ education to selected poor, is a poorly thought through intervention. We have created extremely expensive schools for a few hundred students when Government of Punjab runs some 50,000 plus schools, most of which are lacking facilities or teachers in one way or the other. And even these 50,000 schools are not enough as millions of children, in Punjab, are still out of school. So, the thousands of rupees being spent on one child could have been spent on many children. It is a choice that the government is making, but a choice that it is making while having committed to implementing 25A. And clearly Daanish will also not do much for quality of education being imparted in the 50,000 government schools mentioned. Similarly, laptop distribution, scholarship scheme and PEC initiative are not addressing the access or quality issue directly.
Let me make one issue very clear. Whenever the idea of Daanish Schools and/or laptop distribution has been criticised, PML(N) supporters have come back with the response that these initiatives are surely doing something useful and good. How can they be criticised then? But this response misses the point. Daanish Schools might be excellent for the children enrolled in them, but the question is: the government has a limited amount of money available, something they never let us forget, then should we not think hard before spending this money and should it not be spent in a way that we get the maximum bang for our buck, given our priorities.
If the priority is 25A and the issue of access to quality education for all children, could we not have spent the billions that have been spent on Daanish Schools or on laptops in a better way? Our data shows that gender gap in education is large and girls drop out of schools quickly if basic facilities like a boundary wall or working toilets are not present. Could we not have prioritized these issues? Would that have been better use of money?
We know that government sector teachers are better qualified, better trained, better paid and given more benefits compared to private sector teachers in Pakistan. Yet, in terms of examination/test results, children enrolled in public sector lag behind children from private schools. This gives tremendous opportunity for designing interventions that support teachers, mentor them, tighten their accountability and monitoring/evaluation systems to get them to deliver higher quality. It seems, given the size of the public sector, this would provide us the biggest bang for the buck in terms of addressing access and quality issues. But these interventions do not seem to capture the imagination of the government. And this seems to be true of all provincial governments. There are professional development programmes in place but they are not priority programmes, with the resources, money and brain-power, needed to make them work well.
Most children in Pakistan are either out of schools or in schools that give poor quality of education. Although the state, formally, has accepted that education is a basic right, the evidence over the last couple of years since the Amendment has been passed, suggests that there is little seriousness in addressing the issues of access and quality and more populist policies, as opposed to more substantive ones, are taking the resources. This might be politically savvy, but it is not going to lead to educational outcomes that Pakistan needs and has constitutionally committed to.
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