Decoding the Performance of Schools in India

UDISE+ Dashboard is a very comprehensive database of all schools in India. The portal gives comprehensive data about schools in India. Using this data, I tried to bring out some data analysis that would aid the school administrators. Some of the performance parameters nationally are given below

Shows tremendous improvement from earlier times. Look at the Infra and Toilets- Its great to see that 95% of the Indian schools have full fledged toilets which was very very low earlier on.

Teacher to Student Ratio

Statistics at a National Level ( All India)

22.4% of the private schools handle more than 37.1% of the students. While 68.5% of Government schools handle 49.5% of the students. This may not give any details, but let us look average number of students per schools both in Government and Private.

Average number of students per Government School = 126

Average number of students per private school = 290

Surely the infrastructure usage wise, the Private schools are far better than Government Schools. Government Schools have underutilized assets that needs to be used effectively to increase the enrollments per schools.

Next let us look at the Student to Teacher ratio in Private and Government Schools.

Average number of Students per Teacher in Government School = 27

Average number of Students per Teacher in Private School = 27

So unlike what is thought that there is a teacher shortage in government schools, it is far from reality Government schools have equal number of teachers has the private schools. There appears to be no shortage. However the pay given in Government schools to handle 27 students on an average is surely more than what Private schools pay their teachers. Most of the Government teachers get 6th CPC pay, while average pay in Private schools is around Rs 20000/- per month.

However, some of them also argue that these numbers may not be purely correct, since many guest teachers are also appointed contract basis who are paid peanuts…something like Rs 6000/- to Rs 8000/-….way below the minimum wages. So, the Student to Teacher ratio may not be the correct indicator, instead the number of full time staff and part time staff would give the correct indicator.

The number of schools by category is given below

One of the most important factors affecting parents decision is the medium of instructions. The analysis shows that Kannada medium schools are not very attractive and parents are choosing English medium schools where the average enrollment per school is almost double that of the Kannada medium schools

Average number of students per Kannada medium school =103

Average number of students per English medium school =243

The existing Kannada Medium schools should be made more attractive by offering English as a subject right from Grade 1. The gap in Rural -Urban enrollment in Kannada and English medium schools is also excessively big. That is a greater number of Rural students enroll in Kannada schools. My hunch is that majority of SC/ST/OBC students also enroll in Kannada schools because of their disadvantaged situation. Kannada Schools are fine, but they need to be managed professionally on lines of other private schools. The emphasis should shift from enrollments to learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy in these schools.

One of the unique reports given by UDISE is the National percentage of SC, ST, OBC ,General Category student enrolled nationally.

From the above data it is clearly inferred that at Class 1 level, 25.66% of the students enrolled belong to the General Category, 44.23% of the students belong to the OBCs, 19.28% of the students belong to SC category and 10.83% of the students belong to the ST Category. This also gives a broad understanding of the caste structure nationally. However, as we go to each state, these proportions change.

For example, in Karnataka, at Class 1 level, 11.18% of them belong to General category, 62.53% belong to OBCSs, 18.66% of them belong to SCs, while 7.63% belong to the STs. Again, this represents the broad caste structure in the state. But here the OBCs have an exceptionally large representation of around 62.53% much more than the 44.23% at the national level.

Now one of the popular perceptions is that OBCs/SC/ST students are not good at studies. Contrary to this, the current data provided by UDISE shows that the propensity to fail is same among all the communities. So, I undertook a detailed study of number of repeaters for an examination category wise and the results showed that the proportion of repeaters was same that of the proportion of enrollment. Around 41.8% of the repeaters were OBCs, 28.7% were General category, 20.81% were SCs and 8.64% were STs. This clearly shows the educational outcomes are not based on social category, but it is based on the quality of schools and teachers which at present is not tracked. UDISE+ should conduct skill test for teacher and collect data from schools on student outcome which will help build performance data for each teacher and school.

However the disturbing part is that the dropout rate is way higher among SC/ST/OBCs. The rate is 0.5% for General, 1.3% for OBCs, 1.82% for SCs and 2.69% for STs. This needs to be improved so that students from disadvantaged communities should be encouraged to complete their education till Grade 10 at least, else the job opportunities for them will diminish.

Watch out more the continued article next week on more interesting analysis!!!