Enacted in 2009, the Right to Education Act didn't only aim to make sure every Indian child went to school, it also attempted to raise the quality of education and reduce exam stress. It did away with annual examinations till Class 12. The Class 10 board exam was made optional. Nobody could be failed till Class 8.
These exams were replaced by a system called Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, better known as CCE. The CCE provides for shorter, graded tests spread across the academic year. CCE tests are meant to evaluate the child’s holistic development.
However, some analysts say that the RTE Act's CCE has made life tougher for students. The CCE, they say, puts teachers under increased pressure to prove that students are indeed improving from one test to another. The Annual Survey of Education Report of 2013 also shows that since the implementation of the RTE, the overall quality of elementary education has in fact declined in government schools.
“Even though the emphasis has gone away from marks, there has been an utterly bizarre shift of focus,” said Disha Nawani, a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences who has studied the CCE system closely. “The whole purpose is to show improvement. This is the malaise of the education system. If you are evaluating students, you are evaluated for how much they improve. If they got a C grade in the first semester, they have to show a B grade by the next," she said.
The Central Board of Secondary Education took the lead in interpreting CCE. State boards such as those in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have followed its lead. Under the CCE, as interpreted by the CBSE, there are to be two forms of assessment, one 'formative' and the other 'summative'. Summative assessments refer to regular end-of-term exams. Formative assessments shift the focus to regular quizzes, projects, group discussions, elocution and debates. There is one summative and two formative assessments every semester.
The CBSE first experimented with the CCE in 2004, when it said that no child would fail a year until Class 5. In 2006, it extended the CCE until Class 7. With the RTE Act, 12,000 CBSE schools have implemented the CCE. On paper, the idea sounds brilliant. It focuses on all-round development through multiple modes of teaching, from life skills to visual arts to vocational education.
However, it missed the point by introducing a system of grading for these extremely intangible skills. Among the life skills, teachers are expected to grade on a five-point scale are such things as "self-awareness", "creative thinking", "empathy" and "managing emotions". Teachers are also expected to grade children’s values, which includes their attitudes towards “Teachers, Schoolmates, School Programmes and (the) Environment.”
It is bad enough that children are assessed critically for their prowess in committing textbooks to memory. These guidelines go further, leaving no aspect of the child unexamined. Far from reducing a child’s need to perform, they actually increase it. “We think we have a right to teach children, but it’s a bit unfair that we didn’t give them a right to let us teach them,” asked Kavita Anand, executive director of Adhyayan Quality Education. “Children do not opt to be examined.”
Apart from the extra paperwork, which magnifies in classrooms with inadequate teacher-student ratios, teachers are also burdened to prove that under their watch, children have miraculously become better human beings. “The fear of doing badly runs across the educational system, from students to teachers. Too much is made out about the students cheating. But there's pressure on teachers to show that with their support, students have improved over time," said Nawani of TISS.
State boards across the country are gradually integrating the CCE into their systems, but are finding it difficult to cope.
“At this moment the governmental system relies on a dysfunctional Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation process in schools, periodic sampled Achievement Surveys (every three years), and possibly Std 10 examinations to assess quality of learning achievements,” wrote Madhav Chavan, CEO-President of Pratham Education Foundation, in the Annual Survey of Education Report. “Although the government will defend all three, as any system would, in reality none of these actually give reliable information on what children have learned.”
The problem lies in the implementation of the qualitative aspect of the RTE. The quality of reading and arithmetic may have actually declined since the RTE was implemented. In Assam and Bihar, for example, both states felt that CCE was negatively impacting their quality of education. Since it was implemented in 2010, the number of Class 5 students in government schools who could read Class 2 textbooks actually declined in these two states. This coincides with the national trend.
“Unfortunately, only the ‘1 per cent’ schools can afford to provide good-quality education,” said Anand of Adhyayan. “They can afford to make it clear that exams are only one of many hurdles and can be cracked without rote learning.”
This is not to say that the RTE has failed to bring any benefits. To begin with, it has started to improve the quality of infrastructure at schools across the country. In the Annual Survey of Education Report, researchers observed that 45.3 per cent of schools complied with RTE standards in 2013, up from 38.9 per cent in 2010. Libraries, playgrounds, toilets and access to drinking water have also all increased at varying rates. The report surveys only rural schools.
However, students still find themselves unable or unwilling to escape from the system of evaluation, because too much in the world beyond their schools depends on their marks, from higher education to jobs. In 2011, the CBSE made Class 10 public exams optional for those students who wished to remain in the same school for the Classes 11 and 12. Initially, most parents made their children attempt the 10th standard board examination anyway.
But soon they realised that no exams didn't mean less stress, it meant more. “The number of students taking [the option of skipping 10th standard exams] is reducing, not increasing,” said Anand.
These exams were replaced by a system called Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, better known as CCE. The CCE provides for shorter, graded tests spread across the academic year. CCE tests are meant to evaluate the child’s holistic development.
However, some analysts say that the RTE Act's CCE has made life tougher for students. The CCE, they say, puts teachers under increased pressure to prove that students are indeed improving from one test to another. The Annual Survey of Education Report of 2013 also shows that since the implementation of the RTE, the overall quality of elementary education has in fact declined in government schools.
“Even though the emphasis has gone away from marks, there has been an utterly bizarre shift of focus,” said Disha Nawani, a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences who has studied the CCE system closely. “The whole purpose is to show improvement. This is the malaise of the education system. If you are evaluating students, you are evaluated for how much they improve. If they got a C grade in the first semester, they have to show a B grade by the next," she said.
The Central Board of Secondary Education took the lead in interpreting CCE. State boards such as those in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have followed its lead. Under the CCE, as interpreted by the CBSE, there are to be two forms of assessment, one 'formative' and the other 'summative'. Summative assessments refer to regular end-of-term exams. Formative assessments shift the focus to regular quizzes, projects, group discussions, elocution and debates. There is one summative and two formative assessments every semester.
The CBSE first experimented with the CCE in 2004, when it said that no child would fail a year until Class 5. In 2006, it extended the CCE until Class 7. With the RTE Act, 12,000 CBSE schools have implemented the CCE. On paper, the idea sounds brilliant. It focuses on all-round development through multiple modes of teaching, from life skills to visual arts to vocational education.
However, it missed the point by introducing a system of grading for these extremely intangible skills. Among the life skills, teachers are expected to grade on a five-point scale are such things as "self-awareness", "creative thinking", "empathy" and "managing emotions". Teachers are also expected to grade children’s values, which includes their attitudes towards “Teachers, Schoolmates, School Programmes and (the) Environment.”
It is bad enough that children are assessed critically for their prowess in committing textbooks to memory. These guidelines go further, leaving no aspect of the child unexamined. Far from reducing a child’s need to perform, they actually increase it. “We think we have a right to teach children, but it’s a bit unfair that we didn’t give them a right to let us teach them,” asked Kavita Anand, executive director of Adhyayan Quality Education. “Children do not opt to be examined.”
Apart from the extra paperwork, which magnifies in classrooms with inadequate teacher-student ratios, teachers are also burdened to prove that under their watch, children have miraculously become better human beings. “The fear of doing badly runs across the educational system, from students to teachers. Too much is made out about the students cheating. But there's pressure on teachers to show that with their support, students have improved over time," said Nawani of TISS.
State boards across the country are gradually integrating the CCE into their systems, but are finding it difficult to cope.
“At this moment the governmental system relies on a dysfunctional Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation process in schools, periodic sampled Achievement Surveys (every three years), and possibly Std 10 examinations to assess quality of learning achievements,” wrote Madhav Chavan, CEO-President of Pratham Education Foundation, in the Annual Survey of Education Report. “Although the government will defend all three, as any system would, in reality none of these actually give reliable information on what children have learned.”
The problem lies in the implementation of the qualitative aspect of the RTE. The quality of reading and arithmetic may have actually declined since the RTE was implemented. In Assam and Bihar, for example, both states felt that CCE was negatively impacting their quality of education. Since it was implemented in 2010, the number of Class 5 students in government schools who could read Class 2 textbooks actually declined in these two states. This coincides with the national trend.
“Unfortunately, only the ‘1 per cent’ schools can afford to provide good-quality education,” said Anand of Adhyayan. “They can afford to make it clear that exams are only one of many hurdles and can be cracked without rote learning.”
This is not to say that the RTE has failed to bring any benefits. To begin with, it has started to improve the quality of infrastructure at schools across the country. In the Annual Survey of Education Report, researchers observed that 45.3 per cent of schools complied with RTE standards in 2013, up from 38.9 per cent in 2010. Libraries, playgrounds, toilets and access to drinking water have also all increased at varying rates. The report surveys only rural schools.
However, students still find themselves unable or unwilling to escape from the system of evaluation, because too much in the world beyond their schools depends on their marks, from higher education to jobs. In 2011, the CBSE made Class 10 public exams optional for those students who wished to remain in the same school for the Classes 11 and 12. Initially, most parents made their children attempt the 10th standard board examination anyway.
But soon they realised that no exams didn't mean less stress, it meant more. “The number of students taking [the option of skipping 10th standard exams] is reducing, not increasing,” said Anand.
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