Sadaf Aman Despite its ambitious programme of providing free KG to PG education for its students, the State government appears to have done little to translate this into reality if one goes by the latest ranking of school education quality by government think-tank Niti Aayog. Academicians and experts blame government apathy in terms of filling of vacancies, paltry budgetary allocation and lack of infrastructure and facilities behind the State’s poor performance where it was ranked 18 among 20 states.
In the first-ever School Education Quality Index 2019 Telangana has scored 29.02 per cent in the overall performance. Further, from 2015-16 (base year) to 2016-17 (reference year), the State has also fallen from 17 to 18th position. Uttar Pradesh and Uttrakhand are the only states that have fared poorer than Telangana.
In terms of learning and equity outcome too the State’s score hovers around 50 per cent but takes a sharp drop in infrastructure and facilities outcome where it scored just 20 per cent. Access outcome domain is the only area where the State has secured 60 per cent.
The SEQI has also found that the number of single-teacher schools in the State have increased from 11.8 per cent in 2015-16 to 12.6 per cent in 2016-17. In this regard, the report states, “Single teacher schools have an adverse effect on the provisioning of resources, on student learning outcomes and on the supervision of schools.”
Across the State, only 68.4 per cent of elementary schools meet the prescribed teacher norms. There is a negligible improvement in parameter from the base year to reference when Telangana had scored 68 per cent. At the secondary school level, the numbers r nose dived by 24. 6 notches -- at 43.8 per cent in reference year from 45 per cent in the base year.
“Teacher shortage is rampant across government schools both at the elementary and secondary level. In single teacher schools, he/she is expected to teach 22 subjects in all seven periods for classes 1-5 every day. It is humanly impossible,” said city-based educationist Nagarti Narayana.
Telangana along with Andhra Pradesh has also recorded the lowest percentages of filled positions in District Level Academic Training Institutions (DIETs) at 19.4 and 36.0 per cent respectively.
While the RMSA mandates each school to have a minimum of five subject teachers specifically for the core subjects: English, Language, Mathematics, Science and Social Science in TS only 43.6 per cent school have five subject teachers.