Maharashtra: Teacher testing mess

After prolonged hesitation, on September 15 the Maharashtra State Council of Examinations (MSCE) declared that it “proposes” to conduct a statewide Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), as mandated by s.23 (1) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, in November. Maharashtra (pop.112 million) is among the last states to implement TET (conducted nationwide in 2011). Conducting TET is the prerequisite of raising teaching-learning standards because Maharashtra lacks an independent testing framework to judge the quality of the 20,000 teachers absorbed annually in its government and aided schools, or to assess the capability of the 700,000 already teaching in government and aided schools. In June, the state government had given in-principle approval, making TET clearance a precondition of recruitment into public and private schools. The proposal — still pending Cabinet approval — was strongly resisted for the past two years by powerful teachers’ unions supported by several heavyweight politicians who run schools and colleges in the state, under the cover of trusts and societies. Back in 2010 shortly after the RTE Act became operational, the Delhi-based National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) decreed a TET with a minimum score of 60 percent as qualification for teachers in elementary education (class I-VIII). Previously teachers needed to clear the untesting B.Ed (for teaching classes V-XII) and diploma in education (D.Ed) or diploma in teacher education D.Ted (for teaching classes I-VII). Currently 362 teacher training colleges offer the one-year B.Ed  programme and 1,082 offer the two-year D.Ed programme in situ or by way of correspondence courses. “B.Ed is perhaps the only post-graduate study programme which accepts 45 percent in graduation. All other postgrad programmes mandate 55 percent. The B.Ed syllabus and curriculums are age-old, of a mere one year’s duration, and the exam is easy to clear. Therefore the more rigorous TET which tests subject knowledge along with pedagogy is welcome. However it’s important to also improve the quality of teacher training colleges and continually assess teachers,” says Dr. Ramandeep Sachdeva, an alumna of Punjab University and Institute for Technology and Management (ITM), Mumbai and currently principal (B.Ed) of the SL Women’s College of Education, Mumbai, affiliated with SNDT University. Teacher training colleges offering the two-year D.Ed programme are not exemplars of quality education either, with NCTE having indiscriminately issued licences to D.Ed teacher training institutes. “As against a demand of 15,000 teachers annually, Maharashtra has a capacity of 75,000. Several D.Ed institutes had to be shut down due to lack of applicants. We expect 50 percent of D.Ed colleges (500-600) to shut down in the coming months,” says N.K. Jarag, director of the Maharashtra State Council of Education Research & Training (MSCERT). Teachers’ resistance to TET designed to establish a national benchmark of teacher quality in the recruitment proc-ess and to evaluate serving teachers within two years, is hardly surprising. Pass percentages in TET conducted across states vary between 1-10 percent. Moreover, last year in the Central TET (conducted by CBSE), 99 percent of teachers who wrote the exam failed. …