Institution development mantras of India’s top-ranked schools

Although India’s school education system is severely criticised in national and international surveys, these indictments are not applicable to the country’s estimated 310,000 licensed private unaided schools. Leaders of India’s top-ranked day, boarding and international schools offer valuable advice on good management and best practices – Dilip Thakore At the fag end of the five-year term in office of the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, a pall of gloom continues to envelope Indian education — from pre-primary to Ph D. For a start, BJP governments at the Centre and in 16 states have reneged on the party’s General Election 2014 manifesto promise to raise annual expenditure (Centre plus states) on education from the 3-3.50 percent GDP rut in which it has been mired for the past 60 years, to 6 percent. On the contrary, with scholars of doubtful credentials and scholarship raised to high positions within the academy, textbook committees and institutions of education governance, learning outcomes have fallen across the board, even as the Centre’s allocation of Rs.85,010 crore for public education in the Union budget 2018-19 was less than the budgeted (but not spent) provision in 2015-16, and aggregated a mere 0.45 percent of GDP. The neglect of public education by the BJP-led government at the Centre is confirmed by the grandiosely nomenclatured NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog — a government think tank established in 2015 to replace the disastrous Soviet-inspired Planning Commission whose inputs-based, unrealistic 12 Central plans devastated the high potential post-World War II Indian economy. “Government spending on education as a whole should be increased to at least 6 percent of GDP (as recommended by the Kothari Commission way back in 1966 — Editor) by 2022. At present, allocations to education by the Centre and states remain close to 3 percent, while according to the World Bank, the world average in this regard (sic) is at 4.7 percent,” says a recently published (November), cautiously worded NITI Aayog report titled Strategy for New India @ 75. That education — especially all-important primary/elementary education — of the world’s largest and most high potential children and youth population is down in the dumps is confirmed by the latest Annual Status of Education Report 2018, compiled and published by the independent, globally reputed Pratham Education Foundation (estb. 1994) whose 30,000-plus volunteers field tested children in primary/elementary education in rural India. ASER 2018 released on January 15 in New Delhi presented the learning outcomes of 546,527 children in the age group 3-16 of 354,944 households in all 596 districts of rural India. Unsurprisingly, ASER 2018 indicates that of all children enrolled in class VIII — the final year of elementary education — more than one-fourth (national average of 27 percent) are unable to read a ‘story’ written in class II textbooks — a “number unchanged from 2016”. Worse, only 44 percent of all children in class VIII can solve a three-digit-by-1-digit numerical division sum correctly, i.e, the majority 56 percent cannot do simple divisional sums. “The learning…