aser 2018, takeaways tamilnadu
January 1, 2019 · 3 min read · essay, writing, village
ASER or the Annual Survey of Education Report is a project by the NGO foundation Pratham. ASER aims at providing insights into the quality of education in India. They’ve been doing this report since 2006. They intend to provide insight into the quality of education in India.
This is great work because of two things. One, we now have measure things that we are doing right and what’s going wrong. Two, Where there were speculation and vague guesses about the standard of education in schools, there is now quantifiable data.
The ASER survey 2018 is a 300 pages long neatly detailed study. I’ll explain the most important takeaways.
About 65% of the Student population still depend on Government schools for their education. This provides to highlight the importance of government schools to provide students with sufficient skills. Any Inefficiency by the government schools will surely have detrimental consequences in the future. It seems to surprise a lot of people, when they tend to find out that 65% of students study in government schools. As a whole, private schools only account for about 30% of the student population.
The table 1 is from the ASER report about the children enrolled in different schools Tamilnadu. Nothing jumps out in particular. But, notice that the percentage of students dropping out of school explodes around students with 11 – 14 years and only escalates after that. Dropping from schools which was 0% at the age of 7-10 doesn’t stop until it’s become 2.3%. This might be the result of the students not being able to cope up with schools due to the added pressure of Right to education act 2009 promising to pass all students till elementary school. Which puts a lot of pressure on the students who have never been pressured. Leading to Dropouts.
Another upset is when we get to the Reading test for std III students. This is a test that provides standard III students with standard II text and ask them to read. It is surprising to find that only around 15% of students are able to read standard II text. What is even more surprising is that more percentage of Government school students are able to read than in private schools.
But, The private schools score increases as the standards increase and completely overpower government schools by VIII standard. Which is apparent in table 6. I just saw the discrepancy but wasn’t able to come up with causation. It might be that private schools tend to be aggressive in maintaining their track record that some schools let go of their weak students.
We see a similar pattern in the Arithmetic test where students are asked to recognize numbers, subtract or divide based on their standard. The percentage of government school students who are able to do arithmetic problems is higher at lower standards. But, as the years increase private schools get the better of it.
