[Nationally, a large majority of students still attend government schools, but the expansion of private institutions has created parallel educational systems — systems that are now colliding. Faced with sharp criticism of the woeful state of government schools, Indian policy makers have enacted a sweeping law intended to reverse their decline. But skeptics say the litany of new requirements could also wipe out many of the private schools now educating millions of students.]
By Vikas Bajaj And Jim Yardley
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
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Parents in
Holy Town ’s low-income, predominantly Muslim neighborhood do not
mind the bare-bones conditions. They like the modest tuition (as low as $2 per
month), the English-language curriculum and the success rate on standardized
tests. Indeed, low-cost schools like Holy Town are part of an ad hoc network that now dominates education
in this south Indian city, where an estimated two-thirds of all students attend
private institutions.
“The
responsibility that the government should shoulder,” Mr. Hakeem said with both
pride and contempt, “we are shouldering it.”
In India , the choice to live outside the faltering grid of
government services is usually reserved for the rich or middle class, who can
afford private housing compounds, private hospitals and private schools. But as
India ’s economy has expanded during the past two decades, an
increasing number of India ’s poor parents are now scraping together money to send
their children to low-cost private schools in hopes of helping them escape
poverty.
Nationally,
a large majority of students still attend government schools, but the expansion
of private institutions has created parallel educational systems — systems that
are now colliding. Faced with sharp criticism of the woeful state of government
schools, Indian policy makers have enacted a sweeping law intended to reverse
their decline. But skeptics say the litany of new requirements could also wipe
out many of the private schools now educating millions of students.
“It’s
impossible to fulfill all these things,” said Mohammed Anwar, who runs a chain
of private schools in Hyderabad and is trying to organize a nationwide lobbying
campaign to alter the requirements. Referring to the law, he said, “If you
follow the Right to Education, nobody can run a school.”
Education
is one of India ’s most pressing challenges. Half of India ’s 1.2 billion people are 25 or younger, and literacy
levels, while improving, could cripple the country’s long-term prospects. In
many states, government education is in severe disarray, with teachers often
failing to show up. Rote drilling still predominates. English, considered a
prerequisite for most white-collar employment in India , is usually not the medium of instruction.
When it
took effect in April 2010, the Right to Education Act enshrined, for the first time, a
constitutional right to schooling, promising that every child from 6 to 14
would be provided with it. For a nation that had never properly financed
education for the masses, the law was a major milestone.
“If we
nurture our children and young people with the right education,” said Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh, commemorating the act with a televised address, “India ’s future as a strong and prosperous country is secure.”
Few
disagree with the law’s broad, egalitarian goals or that government schools
need a fundamental overhaul. But the law also enacted new regulations on
teacher-student ratios, classroom size and parental involvement in school
administration that are being applied to government and private schools. The
result is a clash between an ideal and the reality on the ground, with a
deadline: Any school that fails to comply by 2013 could be closed.
Kapil
Sibal, the government minister overseeing Indian education, has scoffed at
claims that the law will cause mass closings of private schools. Yet in Hyderabad , education officials are preparing for exactly that
outcome. They are constructing new buildings and expanding old ones, partly to
comply with the new regulations, partly anticipating that students will be
forced to return from closing private institutions.
“Fifty
percent will be closed down as per the Right to Education Act,” predicted E.
Bala Kasaiah, a top education official in Hyderabad .
As a boy,
M. A. Hakeem listened as his father bemoaned the slow progress of his fellow
Muslims in India . “Son,” he recalls his father’s saying, “when you grow up,
you should provide education to our community.”
A few
months after Mr. Hakeem completed the 10th grade, his father died. A year
later, in 1986, Mr. Hakeem opened a small preparatory school with nursery
classes. He was 15 years old.
Not yet
old enough to vote, Mr. Hakeem held classes in his family’s home and enlisted
his two sisters to handle administrative tasks. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Hakeem
had opened Holy Town . The school has since produced students who have gone into
engineering, commerce and other fields.
“I’m
fulfilling my father’s dream,” Mr. Hakeem said.
When Holy Town opened, Mr. Hakeem’s neighborhood at the edge of the old
quarter of Hyderabad had one private school, a Catholic one. Today, there are
seven private schools within a half-mile of Holy Town , each charging a few dollars a month and catering to
Muslim students with a largely secular education in English.
Their
emergence roughly coincided with the economic liberalization that began in 1991.
For decades, government officials had blamed rural apathy for India ’s high illiteracy rates, saying that families preferred
sending their children into the fields, not the classroom. But as the economy
started taking off, public aspirations changed, especially among low-income
families.
“In India today, demand is not really a constraint for education —
it’s the supply,” said Karthik Muralidharan, an assistant professor at the University
of California , San
Diego , who has
studied Indian education. “Parents are seeing education as the passport out of
poverty.”
The rising
demand created a new market for private schools, and entrepreneurs big and
small have jumped at the chance to profit from it. Corporate educational chains
opened schools tailored to higher-income families, especially in the expanding
cities. Low-cost schools like Holy Town proliferated in poorer neighborhoods, a trend evident in
most major cities and spreading into rural India .
Estimating
the precise enrollment of private schools is tricky. Government officials say
more than 90 percent of all primary schools are run by or financed by the
government. Yet one government survey found that 30 percent of the 187 million
students in grades 1 through 8 now attend private schools. Some academic studies
have suggested that more than half of all urban students now attend private
academies.
In Mumbai,
so many parents have pulled their children out of government schools that
officials have started renting empty classrooms to charities and labor unions —
and even to private schools. In recent years, Indian officials have increased
spending on government education, dedicating far more money for new schools,
hiring teachers and providing free lunches to students. Still, more and more
parents are choosing to go private.
“What does
it say about the quality of your product that you can’t even give it away for
free?” Mr. Muralidharan said.
Most
low-cost private schools also follow rote-teaching methods because their
students have to take standardized tests approved by the government. But some
studies suggest that teachers in government schools are absent up to 25 percent
of the time. Poor children who attended private schools scored higher on
reading and math tests, according to a study by Sonalde Desai, a professor of
sociology at the University of Maryland , and other scholars.
“There is
not much teaching that happens in the government schools,” said Raju Bhosla,
32, whose children attend one of Hyderabad ’s low-cost private schools. “I never even thought about
putting my kids in government schools.”
Across Hyderabad , work crews in 58 locations are expanding government
schools or constructing new ones. To education officials, the building spree
signals a rebirth of the government system, part of an $800 million statewide
program to bring government schools into compliance with the new law.
For Mr.
Sibal, the national education minister, government schools had atrophied
because of a lack of money. Under Right to Education, states can qualify for
more than $2 billion to improve facilities, hire new teachers and improve
curriculums, he said.
“All these
changes are going to transform the schools system in the next five years,” Mr.
Sibal predicted. As for the tens of thousands of private schools opened during
the past 15 years to satisfy the public’s growing hunger for education, Mr.
Sibal said, “We’ve given them three years time,” referring to the 2013
compliance deadline. “We hope that is enough.”
Skepticism
abounds. Elite private schools, already struggling with requirements that they
reserve slots for poor and minority students, have filed lawsuits. But the
bigger question is what will happen to the tens of thousands of low-cost
private schools already serving the poor.
James
Tooley, a British scholar who has studied private education in India, said
government statistics grossly underestimate private schooling — partly because
so many private institutions are not formally registered. In a recent survey of
the eastern city of Patna , Mr. Tooley found 1,224 private schools, even though
government records listed only about 40.
In Hyderabad , principals at several private schools said inspectors
regularly threatened them with closings unless they paid bribes. Now, the
principals say, the inspectors are wielding the threat of the Right to
Education requirements and seeking even bigger bribes.
Mr. Anwar,
the private school entrepreneur trying to organize a lobbying campaign,
estimated that roughly 5,000 private schools operated in Hyderabad .
“Can the
government close 5,000 schools?” he asked. “If they close, how can the
government accommodate all these students?”