Covid-19: Petition for school vouchers to parents
An estimated 50 percent of India’s 250 million school-going children are enrolled in private schools. Anyone with the meanest intelligence and environmental awareness knows that the quality of K-12 education dispensed in free-of-charge government is rock-bottom. Therefore every aspirational household in the country determined to provide its children modern education prefers English-medium education dispensed by India’s 375,000 private schools and 4000,000 budget private schools. Over the past 70 years huge capital flows have gone into private schools, some of whom are globally comparable with the best in the world. Therefore private schools are valuable institutions which need the continuous support of their parents and society if not government.
Despite the Central government directed closure of all education institutions countrywide private school managements have made swift herculean efforts to switch to online learning incurring considerable expense in training teachers and purchase of digital equipment and software.
Nevertheless several myopic state governments have issued circulars directing private school managements not to collect tuition fees during the lockdown. This is a very dangerous development and has endangered the employment of the country’s 7 million teachers.
EducationWorld supports the proposal of several representation organizations of private school managements including NISA and education experts such as Dr. Geeta Kingdon for the government to fund low-income households through the school voucher system to empower parents to enroll their children in schools of their choice. The government has announced deep reforms in land, labour and agriculture. Exert pressure on government to seize this opportunity to reform the education system as well.
Express your support for the school vouchers to parents and to save the jobs of millions of school teachers by signing this petition: Covid-19: Petition for school vouchers to parents.
