CCE implementation hazards

The recent initiative of the government of India to reform school education has witnessed some bold measures launched by the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry. One such initiative is the continuous and comprehensive evaluation system (CCE), introduced in the countrys 10,000-plus schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). While the ministry seems to have prepared the ground in terms of training teachers/head teachers and installing an external supervisory system of educationists, parents and other stakeholders to provide the necessary support to schools and teachers to implement CCE, there are some missing links in understanding the spirit and essence of the system. Already notes of discord are emerging from CBSE schools even before CCE has struck root.The objective behind CCE is continuous holistic development of school-going children. Therefore the new system needs to be implemented in such a way that there is conscious and deliberate effort by teachers to aid the process. This requires that curricular and co-curricular education is given sufficient emphasis to stimulate cognitive development as well as emotional and social skills, and the aesthetic and kinesthetic intelligences of children. Under the previ-ous competitive examin-ations system, the pressure to excel academically led to the neglect of non-schol-astic intelligences — social, emotional, cultural, and aesthetic — often with disastrous outcomes for parents and students. Within most school managements there is inadequate awareness that the reform process has to have a multi-pronged approach involving multiple stakeholders for effective implementation which is often challenging and complicated. Moreover with rapid expansion of the school education system, additional complexities in terms of scale and magnitude of activities planned by the state also need to be factored in. Many of the reform initiatives launched by the government also demand documentation of the process, development of an information base to provide feedback and introduction of corrective measures. The data collected from monitoring and supervision of various interventions provides advance warning about outcomes and consequences. This helps to fix accountability of the various actors involved in the reform process, and also ensures that they appreciate the purpose and spirit of the reform measures. The implementation of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) — Indias flagship elementary education programme — is a case study testifying to the magnitude and scale of documentation required to implement various reform initiatives for improving quality of school education. Teachers and field functionaries bemoan that day in and day out they are asked to fill numerous forms and submit them to multiple authorities, eventually forcing them either to dilute or abandon their regular teaching duties. Unsurprisingly, they have begun to challenge their involvement in documentation and non-teaching activities which has resulted in less time for teaching-learning thereby contributing to the deterioration of learning outcomes in government schools, even as private school teachers are engaged full-time in teaching, enabling them to record consistently better learning outcomes. Likewise the well-intentioned cce initiative seems to have encountered implementation problems. In this case too, teachers are expected to fill up multiple forms, maintain performance records…