Teacher career paths?

Mired in a multitude of problems

Teachers in low-fee private sector are sometimes paid a salary as low as Rs 1,000 or Rs 1,200 a month. This is not only true of teachers in low fee private schools in rural areas, it happens in urban areas as well. That does not imply that all private school teachers are paid as low, some of the elite schools pay very high salaries, but most private schools fall in the low fee category and the elite private schools are an exception.

The average salary in low fee private schools is higher than the Rs 1,200 mentioned. But not a whole lot higher. If the school charges a fee of Rs. 200 per month from each pupil and if each class has about 30 students in it then the gross revenue, from a class, for the school will be Rs 6,000 per month. How much of this can go to a teacher when some infrastructure cost has to be borne and the entrepreneur, the owner of the school, also needs to make some return for herself. Teacher salaries might not be, on average, more than Rs 4,000 or Rs 5,000 at most.

The minimum wage, for 40 hours of work a week, in Pakistan, for unskilled labour, set by the Government of Pakistan, is Rs 8,000 a month. A lot of the teachers in private sector schools are paid even less than the minimum wage set by the government for unskilled labour. A recent job advertisement, in one of the local papers, advertising a number of posts, advertised the same salary for a teacher as for a peon. Teachers should definitely be eligible for minimum wage but that is a separate issue that will be taken up another day. For the moment it is enough to say that a lot of low fee private sector schools do not pay teachers even the minimum wage.

Equally important, if not more so, is the issue of qualifications of teachers. There are no formal requirements of qualification or training, it seems, for private sector school teachers. The elite schools not only require advanced degrees and sometimes even specialization, they have their own training programmes as well. But this is true of elite private schools only. Most private schools, especially the low fee private schools, do not have almost any requirements. The teacher rolls that we have seen have shown a huge variety in educational backgrounds, experience and training. There are plenty of graduates, even post graduates, but there are, almost always, some teachers that have only completed matriculation or intermediate. The training varies too. Many have certificates in education and some even education degrees, but there are many who have no formal training. Those with more training and qualification usually teach higher grades and are paid more. Where this makes some sense, it also implies that the early years, where students really learn how to learn and learn to love learning and questioning are left to teachers who might not be prepared to fulfil that role.

Some scholars have shown that grades of students going to private schools are better than those going to public schools on average. And this has been used, explicitly and implicitly, to imply that regulating private sector does not make much sense as for profit and/or competition reasons it is already doing well by us. But this does not seem to be right. Even though private sector might be doing better than the public sector, we can still require private sector to impose some conditions regarding salaries and/or qualifications/training to ensure that not only does private sector comply with some of the basic salary requirements, but is also forced to improve the quality of teachers over time.

Public sector teachers are paid more, have more pre-service training and get more in-service training as well. This much seems to be quite well established in the literature. But there are plenty of issues in the public sector too. The biggest question is of course about performance. If they are paid more and are better trained/qualified, why are the results of the public sector schools poorer than comparable private sector schools? It seems that the answer might have to do with the management of teachers and teaching, their incentive and accountability systems and/or lack thereof.

But even in the public sector, though recruitment rules are more clearly stated, there is still lack of clarity about how teachers are recruited or should be recruited and what should be minimum qualifications and training requirements for them. Most recently the government has started 4 year education programmes for producing teachers. In addition there are the two year associate degrees, and then the normal two year B. Ed is also being offered. Finally, though it seems provinces are getting away from hiring teachers with teaching certificates, that option is still being offered by some academic institutions and since teacher recruitment can be a messy process, some teachers with just certificates are still making it through. So, will the career path of a teacher with a four-year degree be the same as someone who has a certificate of teaching post matriculation or intermediate, or even a two-year degree? If the careers are the same, why would anyone go for the four year degree? And if they are different, how will they be differentiated? A lot of these issues still need to be resolved by education authorities in most of the provinces.

But there is a larger design issue facing us as well. If 25A, the right to education clause, added to the Constitution through the 18th Amendment is to be operationalized, we will need a lot more teachers, in public as well as the private sector, to teach all children across Pakistan. Can we produce so many bachelors or 4 year degree holders? Or would we need teachers, say in rural areas or some of the areas that have lower educational attainment, who might be matriculates but have a teaching certificate? We need to work out these details before teacher career paths can be optimally decided.

Designing optimal teacher career paths, for private as well as public sector, seems to be a fairly neglected area. But we cannot achieve goals of education for all or global literacy without focusing on this very important area. As provincial governments mull over the implementation of 25 A, Punjab has recently announced a Commission on Compulsory Education, designing teacher career paths should be an important area to focus on.

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 [email protected]