Over the last two decades, the number of professionals / resource persons /
researchers / academics has dramatically grown in two areas related to
educational improvement / reform -- planning and evaluation -- but not so much
in the part that comes in between: IMPLEMENTATION! We have more and more
data on learning outcomes, provisioning or the lack of it, 'non-performance' of
personnel, expenditure incurred and the like, but comparatively very little on, say,
emotional incentives that help teachers change, or practices that enable diversity
to become a resource rather than constraint, or ways in which debilitating
hierarchies and lack of equity can be addressed in large scale, or how systems
learn to be more responsive...
In particular, the ability to evaluate children's learning as well as programme
'outcomes' has seen the greatest degree of rigour and academic/professional
depth. Suddenly, there is a large number of agencies undertaking research, assessment and evaluation, and 'data' related activities such as monitoring / tracking. And we have people who have studied in places such as Harvard / Cambridge etc. evaluating the work of those who went to somewhat less distinguished schools/universities, studied courses that didn't really prepare them to design or execute brilliant programmes.... And who, of course, are not really able to get teachers to be more committed or display innovation or even basic professional capabilities. Interestingly though, the various studies / data bases + analyses by the highly qualified minds come up with results that their less qualified counterparts can quite accurately predict beforehand!
So why are the highly qualified academics/professionals so involved with
evaluation and planning rather than actually getting things done? I believe
because it is EASIER - easier to point out what is going wrong than actually
make it better, easier to give 'recommendations' than nitty-gritty details that might
lead to improvement (and which you can learn only if you really dirty your hands
and undergo the deep frustration that teaches you what works or doesn't).
Perhaps all this is doing a disservice - certainly more and more people in the
system are coming to believe that whatever they do is not going to work, and will
probably not stand up to the 'scrutiny' of these 'intelligent and knowledgeable'
people. There is also a tendency to focus on what will 'please the researchers' -
hence some states devalue all-round education to emphasize only reading and
writing and numeracy; or are forever 'piloting' aspects that should be well-known
after so many decades and therefore diverting energy from larger systemic
reform that is required post-RTE. Looks like the law of unintended consequences
is beginning to operate...
Tags:
Education