With Delhi set to face elections next year, it may be time to examine once again if what the Aam Aadmi Party represents can be an alternative to the BJP. Politically the AAP seeks not to engage in the left-right debate of mainstream politics. The party prefers to be silent on the polarizing religio-political, social, and economic issues. The AAP is not Left, Liberal or Right.
The AAP claims to be an alternative because it doesn’t draw its ranks from mainstream politicians. It promises committed, transparent and efficient governance alone.
The BJP may have succeeded in making voters rethink the honesty claim and the anti-corruption past of Kejriwal. The political battles have forced the AAP on the backfoot and made its leaders spend less time and energy on their governance agenda. Serious voters will evaluate whether the AAP has indeed delivered on governance in the ten years it has been in power before deciding whether to continue with the AAP or vote it out.
Among the issues they will evaluate are whether the Delhi education revolution was just sound and fury? Or has anything been achieved indeed?
Yamini Aiyar, a senior visiting fellow at Brown University in the U.S.A and former CEO of the Center for Policy Research, says that while learning outcomes must have improved as a result of the AAP government’s initiatives, what is more important is the shift in equilibrium at the level of teachers and school administrators towards improving learning outcomes including for the backbencher than just scoring marks in the exam and achieving all-pass in final exams.
Ms. Aiyar’s recent book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools, chronicles a research project she and fellow researchers undertook on a key education reform initiative of the AAP government. “We did not actively measure degrees of progress in the project but, with the amount of inputs that went in, government data does show some improvements in foundational literacy and numeracy particularly after reading week missions and mission Buniyaad. We find evidence of the shifting equilibrium in how teachers engaged with the challenges of learning in classrooms and students in their approach to teaching – learning. This was slow and steady and its effects were most visible in the aftermath of COVID,” she adds.
For three and a half years (2016 to early 2019), Ms. Aiyar and fellow researchers embedded themselves in eight schools in Delhi and used a variety of methods such as classroom observations and focus group discussions to record the changes happening. In early 2023, a few months after schools reopened following the COVID-19-induced closures, they conducted a final perception survey with teachers before completing their field research. Ms. Aiyar calls the AAP education reform effort unique as it was a concerted part of their political narrative.
A unique effort
Across India, school enrolment is often 100% although dropout rates can be high. The required basic infrastructure at primary school level is in place. Programmes such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan have achieved that. Yet, only half the students coming into Class 6 have the foundational literacy and numeracy – measured as being able to achieve learning outcomes for Class 2. And the newly elected AAP government sought to work on this in Delhi. “It was a genuine, long-term project,” says Ms. Aiyar.
Other state governments have intervened in education through increased funding, welfare measures, or reservations in higher education institutions for underprivileged sections and so on. Few have sought to truly address the problem of poor learning outcomes.
By the time the students reach Class 6, the curriculum has raced ahead. And teachers are focusing on pass percentages. “Most of the students who were unable to catch up early continue to stay behind. They just coast along, class to class with teachers having very little incentive to focus on them,” she says.
The AAP ‘education revolution’ consisted of the following: improving school infrastructure; improving learning quality through disruptive pedagogical interventions; reshaping the assessment structure to align with student mastery over concepts rather than rote learning; and improving accountability through enhanced parental participation in school activities. “Consistent top-down effort went into achieve these,” says Ms. Aiyar.
What the AAP government sought to do was to break the classroom consensus, which was to master the examinations and maximizing pass percentages. “Chunauti sought to shift the classroom consensus by breaking it free from the tyranny of syllabus completion through the idea of ‘differential teaching’ in which teachers teach as per the level of each student. Teachers were to be freed from the syllabus and textbook-associated goals,” Ms. Aiyar adds.
Towards the end of the research study teachers still spoke about students in terms of their exam readiness and of the classroom in terms of syllabus requirements. But now the distance between student learning levels and their gaps in exam readiness had become a topic of conversation amongst teachers, preparing the ground for a dialogue on what it meant for students to acquire subject mastery and how to ‘teach’ in this reality, she says, adding, “The ship was sinking and the Delhi government has been able to steady the course.” In other words, a beginning has indeed been made toward solving the core issues of school education.
Lessons for broad governance reform
What the AAP government has sought to address is the general problem of corrupt, low-performing frontline bureaucrats across India. In education, these are school administrators and teachers.
Ms. Aiyar decries the current trend of bypassing these bureaucrats such as through technology and cash transfers. She says: “What we learned is that long-term change requires deep, consistent, and long-term engagement with the frontline focused on empowering and enabling them,” she says.
Reforms should reiterate the purpose of the work of frontline bureaucrats through the “mission mystique” and motivate them via change agents from within the system. Short-term interventions should expose the frontline bureaucrats to the possibilities of working differently that shift their hierarchical dynamic from being “told” what to do and treated like clerks to being treated like empowered agents. “This means more discretion and delegation at the grassroots of administration, empowering local governments more, and a retooling of the training and managerial system within a bureaucracy that encourages more route Y type management, i.e., management that monitors outcomes over rule compliance,” she says.
Published – December 21, 2024 09:55 pm IST
