'We're scraping the bottom of the barrel for school teachers'
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Manzoor Ahmed, professor emeritus at BRAC University and formerly founder-director of BRAC Institute of Educational Development, is a leading expert on primary education and educational planning in the country. In this interview with Badiuzzaman Bay of The Daily Star, he talks about the government's recent decision to discontinue exams in grades I, II and III, public assessment of student learning and the existing primary education system.
The Ministry of Primary and Mass Education has recently decided to discontinue exams at grades 1-3, which means students of those classes will no longer have to sit for formal exams. How do you see this development?
It is a good decision, and it should have come a long time ago. In fact, the National Education Policy 2010 suggested such an approach because the pedagogy for young children should encourage their natural curiosity and joy of learning and not pressure them to perform in a set way. But as in all decisions in the education sector, whether the benefits will be realised depends on how the decision is implemented and whether other complementary steps are taken.
A measure has been decided, but this has to be seen as part of a holistic approach to student learning and assessment. Keeping the high-stakes PEC [Primary Education Completion] public exam intact, the spirit and purpose of doing away with formal written exam in early grades are not likely to be realised. Apparently, this decision came after a call by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on March 14, at the launch of the Primary Education Week, not to put extra pressure on the children for studying and instead make learning interesting for them. This episode points to a problem of education decision-making. Are the education authorities failing to consider complex and interconnected issues of educational decisions and waiting for signals from the top?
Let's talk about the PEC exam held at the end of grade five. Despite repeated calls by experts for doing away with it and even a decision "in principle" by the ministry to scrap grade V terminal exams as the primary level was extended to grade VIII, students will still have to sit for the PEC exam. Do you find it strange that formal exams in earlier grades were scrapped but the PEC exam was not?
Indeed, education experts and academics have been critical of the PEC exam ever since it was introduced in 2009. This decision was also an ad hoc one and surprising to us because most countries, advanced and developing, had been moving away from formal public examinations at the end of the primary stage.
Public assessment of student learning has now shifted towards the assessment of basic skills such as literacy and numeracy, rather than tests of all the subjects and textbook contents, which is the normal job of the school. The focus in public assessment moved to how the system was performing rather than grading and labelling individual students—subjecting young children to intense pressure and competition.
The fear of the critics about PEC all came true. This is evident in the way students, teachers, and parents remain extremely preoccupied with PEC exams; heavy reliance on private coaching and memorising guidebooks; and turning students into test-takers rather than learners.
Continued advocacy of the education professionals had persuaded the ministry to at least defer the exam to the end of grade VIII as recommended in the Education Policy. But the proposal was shot down in the Cabinet when it was presented there in May 2016—another example of ad hoc decision-making without regard to technical and professional vetting.
How reliable is the PEC exam as a measure of student learning?
A reasonably rigorous national student assessment (NSA) of the students of grade V in 2017 indicate that 88 percent and 83 percent of students, respectively, performed below expected level for grade V in Bangla reading and mathematics. This is in sharp contrast to the over 95 percent pass rate in PEC exams in recent years. So, one may legitimately ask: what does the PEC exam actually measure and how valid is it as a measure of student learning?
There has been a major expansion of primary education opportunities with over 95 percent of the children entering school, although around 20 percent, by official estimates, are dropping out. Children are in school but do they learn to read and count, which is the very basic task of primary education?
We clearly need to redirect our efforts to improving teaching and learning in school and classrooms rather than be obsessed with testing as the means of improving quality.
Besides the problematic performance evaluation mechanism, what are the issues currently dogging our primary education system?
There are major structural issues in primary education including common unified service for all, ensuring quality with a focus on teachers, extending universal education to grade VIII and beyond, and decentralising planning and management of school education. I will discuss the first two related points.
First, the National Education Policy envisaged a unified system with acceptable quality for all children. There are today at least four major categories with various sub-categories of primary education services with varying quality and learning content: government and recently nationalised primary schools; government-supported madrasas (and Qawmi madrasas); private kindergartens; and NGO-run non-formal primary schools. About two-thirds of the students are in the government schools while the rest are divided among the other categories.
The government needs to ensure the quality of learning and teaching provisions for mainstream schools so that the large majority of children have access to services of acceptable quality. The non-government schools then will have a benchmark of quality to follow and parents would not feel the compulsion to run away from the public system.
The second point follows from the first. Quality improvement of the primary school ultimately depends on the quality, skills and motivation of the teaching force. Teachers' salary has improved but many feel that a parity of esteem has not been established with other public servants. Moreover, only the teachers of old government schools are the beneficiaries of the enhanced salary, leaving almost half of the teachers out.
More importantly, does school teaching attract the most capable and talented of graduates? A peculiar legacy from the colonial times in the South Asian sub-continent is that teachers are appointed first (mostly college graduates now) in a school and then sent to pedagogy training—unlike the general practice in other parts of the world.
Future teachers in most countries have to go through a general college degree programme along with teacher training in a four-year course. This "concurrent" model, rather than the "sequential" model as in our case, allows for the young people after high school to be identified as future teachers and taken through a long academic, social, emotional and ethical moulding for the teaching profession, as in other professions such as medicine, engineering, law, etc.
In our case, for the college graduates, school teaching is the last occupational choice. We are actually scraping the bottom of the graduates' barrel for recruitment into teaching. Professional training such as Dip-in-Ed, or a plethora of in-service training cannot compensate for basic capability deficits.
The best and the brightest have to be attracted into a four-year "concurrent" teacher preparation course, with the incentive of stipends. Simultaneously, two other steps are needed: all measures for quality assurance have to be enforced in a hundred degree colleges, where the four-year course may be introduced; and a national teaching service corps has to be established with appropriate remuneration, status, and career path for the graduates of the new course. In ten years, we will begin to see the results in performance of schools and students.
Why do you think the National Education Policy couldn't be implemented even after nearly 10 years?
There has never been a systematic and concerted plan of action to implement the education policy—only a piecemeal and fragmented effort has been made, which often failed to produce the desired result or created new problems. The policy itself had provided for a permanent commission to oversee and guide the implementation of the policy and monitor progress. It is high time that such a commission with genuine professionals and empowered with required authority be appointed.
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