Case for official school league tables

CONCERN FOR QUALITY in school education has become stronger than ever during the recent past, as a number of studies by government, NGOs, and the private sector have highlighted the low cognitive skills of Indian children. The 12th Plan document acknowledges the importance of learning achievements and has set the goal to œimprove learning outcomes that are measured, monitored and reported independently at all levels of school education. The Union ministry of human resource development (HRD) is also backing the drive to raise learning outcomes as evidenced by the emphasis given to measuring learning and ensuring good learning outcomes in its joint review mission report of July 2012. While typically, the solutions for remedying low achievement and improving education quality involve increasing schools™ physical resources, teacher-pupil ratios, teacher certification and remuneration, the failure of such inputs-based solutions is well-documented worldwide. Most contemporary literature based on global best-practices suggests that reform of incentive and accountability structures in school systems is the best way to improve institutional effort and student learning outcomes. One powerful way of improving learning outcomes is by increasing the information flow to parents and communities about the learning attainments of their children, which will enable the former to hold teachers/schools accountable. In addition, sharing information with parents and communities about school performance also introduces an element of institutional competition which can stimulate greater efforts to improve teaching-learning standards. Students™ learning outcomes vary greatly from school to school. However, in the absence of institutional information about schools™ performance, parents are left to judge the quality of schools on the basis of the size of school grounds, infrastructure, reported use of technology, availability of language and math labs, etc, which are inadequate and sometimes misleading indicators of school quality. Institutional opacity prevents parents from making inter-school comparisons and informed school choices. The Indian secondary examination system is exclusively focused on testing the eligibility of students for undergraduate education. Noticeably missing is the use of examination data to identify high and low-performing schools, geographical regions and socio-economic groups. This leads to inefficient decision making and hinders remedial action in specific schools, regions or socio-economic groups. The magnitude of a problem needs to be measured before it can be solved. Similarly, unless there™s reliable evidence to prove how every school is performing academically relative to its peers, their managements have little incentive to improve teaching-learning standards. A very simple ˜information liberalisation™ option is regular release of rankings of schools, based on the performance of their students in annual board examinations. Currently, parents choose schools for their children purely on the basis of perception, or at best, perceptual rankings which don™t capture the reality of actual academic performance. The advantage of publishing detailed information about the relative performance of students of every school is that it makes objective performance data of all schools available, which is surely better than perceptual information. Several countries have been publishing school performance data for decades. The history of the liberalisation of factual data relating to the academic…