- David Vumlallian Zou, M.Phil; PhD
Introduction: Purely in terms of quantity, there is no dearth of schools in Manipur. At least on paper, there already is a fairly good network of schools serving the hill areas of Manipur. Even remote villages usually house a school of some kind, and mission schools step in where the Government fails. But without adequate student strength, private schools are financially not a viable option in some areas. Today the schooling system (especially the Government sector) is plagued by a deep lack of accountability. Teacher absenteeism is a notorious problem in India’s state-run schools that have turned into holy cows to be milked by corrupt bureaucrats, absentee-teachers and parasitical chiefs. Ours is essentially a crisis of quality, not simply quantity. In the hill areas of Manipur, it is possible to identify at least four types of schools: Government, private aided, private unaided and mission schools. The “quality crisis” in the state schools is reflected in the flight of students to private schools. To their great credit, the Catholic schools totally outperformed both the Government and Protestant counterparts. The performance of Protestant mission schools left much to be desired, and an overhaul here can potentially benefit the poorest of the poor in the interior villages bereft of state schools.
Still low Literacy, but in Denial Mode
According to 2001 Census, the literacy rate of the Zou tribe is estimated to be 61 per cent 1– below the state average of 68.8 per cent. Not only is the level of general literacy low, it is a matter of concern that there is a significant gap between male and female literacy within the Zou community. The 2001 Census figures Zou female literacy rate at a pathetic 53.0 per cent against 70.2 per cent for the male counterparts. This humbling picture seems to have been confirmed by a recent survey by National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (New Delhi) which shows female literacy rate for certain Zou villages – Tangpijol at 15.28%, Behiang at 38. 08%, Tuaitengphai at 56. 96%, etc.
In spite of being confronted by such social facts, the leaders of Zou community are in a state of denial. They pretend that, by now, everyone must have had functional literacy enough to read the Bible, hymnals and the local newspapers. The Church also turns a deaf ear to the suggestion that Sunday Schools could be reformed as an effective tool for spreading basic literacy. In the social history of both Wales and Mizoram, Sunday Schools played an important role in providing “Bible-based literacy” to women, children and deprived adults. But in Manipur today, somehow Sunday Schools have been strangely equated with boring “Bible studies” which falsely assume the audience to be universally literate. With a general literacy of only 61%, almost half of the Zou population is handicapped by illiteracy to participate in any intelligent discussion of religious or secular issues. Till now, the ugliness of this social scourge has been either unrecognized or grossly ignored by the vanguards of the Zou society. As Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid!” in 1992, we need to realize today, “It’s basic education, stupid!”
It is high time to take stock of the situation, and do something – at least in the context of Church’s literary mission to spread the Word in the world. Christianity is basically a religion of the written word than oral tradition; it is a religion oriented to mass literacy than illiteracy. For it is written, and even printed – but not spoken: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (St. John 1:1).
Carving a Niche for Protestant Mission Schools
Unlike Catholic missionary schools, the Protestant schools have not yet taken their educational endeavors seriously. While the Catholics carefully select strategic locations to start new schools and hostels, the Protestants wastefully spread their limited human and financial resources thinly in many villages. Apparently a number of such mission schools are meant to appease the sentiments of certain village chiefs or local church leaders. Often the real objective is not to provide basic “quality education” for all. This skepticism is justified by the fact that the “Education Boards” of our mission schools are usually constituted by people with little or no professional competence. It is unimaginable how such an education board could identify – let alone attract – teaching talent in our school system.
As a matter of fact, running primary school is no less demanding than running institutions of higher education. But professional service or qualified educationists do not come free of cost. Without handsome pay package or other incentives, it will be difficult to attract high quality teachers – especially graduates with a good command of English and other “transferable skills.” The single most important catalyst required to reform any school system is quality teacher. A recent research shows that investing in quality teachers is more profitable than investing in school infrastructure.
At present, it will be impossible to maintain some of the existing schools which show poor performance. Then, how do we ensure that everyone gets functional literacy in remote villages? A possible solution lies in reforming the Sunday School by gearing it toward total literacy mission, and investing in the training of its teachers. It may even be possible to attempt something like the current “Teach for India” project initiated in 2007, and run by volunteers responding to the publicity generated by the national media. This is modeled on Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America (TFA). Meanwhile, it will be necessary to invest a substantial part of our Education Board’s resources in the establishment of Education Vouchers (scholarships) meant for talented pupils hailing especially from rural areas. The logic is to fund promising students, not sick schools. So, funding rural students instead of mission schools may go a long way in providing educational opportunities to the largest number of children.
Functional Private Schools vis-à-vis Failing Public Schools
Is the popularity of private fee-charging schools in Manipur to be explained by their superior quality? Elite private education is always considered to be the privilege of a few, and any suggestion that it might be there to serve the poor would be scoffed at. Not all private schools, however, boast of qualified staff and infrastructure comparable to state-funded schools. But the private institutions are generally more accountable: ‘the teachers are accountable to the manager (who can fire them), and, through him or her, to the parents (who can withdraw their children)’. The salaries of private-school teacher in rural India are typically less than one-fifth the salary of regular public-school teachers. In spite of their lower salary, dedicated private teachers tend to product better results than trained Government teachers.
It is not difficult, therefore, to understand why even the poor quit free public schools, and vote with their feet to move their children to low-cost private schools. In fact, these students are refugees from a failing state system. Impressively, many private schools offer fee waivers for deserving students from deprived families. Private unaided schools are doing a better job at educating children at lower cost than the government system. Indeed, it's remarkable how many low-cost private schools manage to do more with less. Sponsored by the Indian government The Public Report on Basic Education in India (The PROBE Team, 1999) indicates that private schools in India are ‘more effective and less costly’ than their public counterparts at improving the mathematical performance of students.
Even during the days of the British Raj, private mission schools in the hills of Manipur surpassed the Government schools in the valley. Reporting on the Ukhrul Mission Schools, Rev. William Pettigrew in 1923 said: “The President of the Darbar visited our Ukhrul School … and has every good reason for thinking that the boys passing … have a better knowledge than the State school scholars.”2 Will it be possible to replicate the results of the private sector in government schools? Or, can this phenomenon be leveraged to improve educational opportunities for all children via adoption of Education Vouchers?
Educational Entrepreneurship and the Spirit of Self-Help
Based on his study of “The Enterprise of Education,” James Tooley (2001) drew this conclusion: If state schools aren’t working, “exit” is a viable option. Without the incentives and accountability of the private sector, Tooley doubts whether public schools will be able to replicate the success of the former. There is a growing catalogue of Government schools that have been ‘fresh-started’, only to be given up on in despair of ever really improving. Politicians usually are neither willing nor able to fix this longstanding problem. More state intervention also may crowd out any last traces of educational enterprise. The more government intervenes, the more it crowds out this spirit of self-help.
The spirit of self-help can be seen in the most hostile environment. In the slums and villages of India provide several stories of educational entrepreneurs, prompted by community concern as well as business acumen. At present, socialist sentiments of the Government and the public have several prejudices against alternative approaches to education. Tooley (2001) suggests that what is needed perhaps is the creation of a chain of ‘budget-priced’ private schools. Such an alternative system will allow those trapped in mediocre government ‘sink’ schools to escape. Ultimately, it is not a question of privatisation or not – but how to make quality private schools accessible to poor families.
A Case for Education Vouchers, Competition and Incentives
An Education Voucher scheme is a coupon or a cheque provided by a Government to students to enable them to attend a school of their own choice. A voucher may be either universal or targeted – that is, for all children, or for particularly targeted groups. Universal vouchers are adopted by Chile in 1980 (Larrañaga, 1997) and Sweden in 1992. Targeted vouchers schemes are enacted in countries as diverse as the USA, Bangladesh, New Zealand and Columbia. In the US, the Milwaukee Parent Choice Programme was introduced in 1990 as a targeted voucher scheme for low-income families to attend private schools (Witte 2000). The Cleveland voucher scheme followed suit in 1995. An alternative ‘targeted voucher’ called Florida A+ Education Plan has been tried in Florida in June 1999. This became the first statewide voucher project to be implemented in the USA. The idea is that schools will improve their performance owing to the fear of being shamed into closing or loosing students and revenue.
The basic idea of an Education Voucher is that the government would fund students instead of schools and that the money would follow the student and get paid to whichever school that the child chooses to enroll in. The scheme will fund deserving students – not failing schools. It will make parents and pupils ‘free to choose’ either private or public schools. The key idea behind a voucher system is not an ideological predisposition towards either private or public schools, but rather the belief that competition can be a force for improving both public and private schools. Thus, the claim is not that all private schools are superior to government schools. Rather, the aim is to think about ways of providing the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of society with the same set of choices faced by their better-off counterparts. This is exactly what a voucher or scholarship would do. Providing every child an opportunity to go to a school of their choice will not only expand the set of choices open to the poor, but also force the government schooling system to improve in order to be viable (Sexton 2002; Muralidharan 2006).
The attractiveness of such a system is that it harnesses the power of incentives and competition while avoiding the biggest weakness of the market to caters only to those with purchasing power. A school voucher puts purchasing power in the hands of every parent, and is thus likely to be a deeply empowering experience (Kelkar 2006). A voucher system also provides the right incentives for schools to not only enroll children but to prevent drop outs (since the voucher money goes with the child). Schools will have the right incentives to hire the best teachers, hold them accountable, and be responsive to parents’ needs (Muralidharan 2006). Conventional experience teaches us that competition makes for a better delivery of goods and services than monopolies. This point is beautifully conveyed by an African poem (Friedman 2006: 137):
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.
Addressing Concerns about Education Vouchers
While voucher-based systems hold a lot of promise, there are certainly a range of concerns with such a model – some well founded, and others less so. One of the less well-founded (but common) reactions to the idea of vouchers is an emotional response that equates Education Voucher with an abdication on the part of the Government of its duty to provide universal quality education. However, the idea of vouchers does not in any way deny that it is ultimately the state’s responsibility to ensure that all children are educated and that nobody is left behind. The key distinction is that while it is clearly the state’s responsibility to finance and regulate schools, it is not at all clear whether it should be in the actual business of running sick schools. The state would thus in no way be absolved of its responsibility of “ensuring” universal basic education of high quality. Recent cross-country research shows that the best educational outcomes appear to be obtained by systems that combine public financing and private management in education – which is exactly the kind of public-private partnership that a voucher program would be (Sandstrom & Bergstrom 2002; Muralidharan 2006).
Concluding Remarks
The point is not to claim that Education Vouchers can be a “silver bullet” solution that will solve all our educational woes overnight. Rather it should be thought of as an especially promising idea among a range of policy options we have to improve the quality of education. To begin with, the pilot voucher project can also be initiated by Protestant mission schools in Manipur to rationalize the use of their limited resources in remote villages. Sunday Schools too can contribute to the success of the total literacy mission especially in interior villages. At present, there is much wastage due to duplication of work by mission schools operating without economies of scale. There is room for cooperation, coordination and pooling of resources between the different denominations of the Zou Christians. Since quality teacher constitutes the most important element of school reform, our Education Boards need to look for teaching talent beyond our narrow domestic walls. Though uttered in a different context, the words of Winston Churchill here rings true, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to try and find a successful outcome acceptable to all that counts.”
Select Bibliography
Footnote:
1 Census of India 2001: Manipur – The Scheduled Tribes, Office of the Registrar General, India.
2 CBCNEI Office, Guwahati, Assam, “Educational Report for 1923” (cyclostyled) by Rev. William Pettigrew. Also in Elungkiebe Zeliang (2005) History of Christianity in Manipur: Source Materials, Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre.
Introduction: Purely in terms of quantity, there is no dearth of schools in Manipur. At least on paper, there already is a fairly good network of schools serving the hill areas of Manipur. Even remote villages usually house a school of some kind, and mission schools step in where the Government fails. But without adequate student strength, private schools are financially not a viable option in some areas. Today the schooling system (especially the Government sector) is plagued by a deep lack of accountability. Teacher absenteeism is a notorious problem in India’s state-run schools that have turned into holy cows to be milked by corrupt bureaucrats, absentee-teachers and parasitical chiefs. Ours is essentially a crisis of quality, not simply quantity. In the hill areas of Manipur, it is possible to identify at least four types of schools: Government, private aided, private unaided and mission schools. The “quality crisis” in the state schools is reflected in the flight of students to private schools. To their great credit, the Catholic schools totally outperformed both the Government and Protestant counterparts. The performance of Protestant mission schools left much to be desired, and an overhaul here can potentially benefit the poorest of the poor in the interior villages bereft of state schools.
Still low Literacy, but in Denial Mode
According to 2001 Census, the literacy rate of the Zou tribe is estimated to be 61 per cent 1– below the state average of 68.8 per cent. Not only is the level of general literacy low, it is a matter of concern that there is a significant gap between male and female literacy within the Zou community. The 2001 Census figures Zou female literacy rate at a pathetic 53.0 per cent against 70.2 per cent for the male counterparts. This humbling picture seems to have been confirmed by a recent survey by National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (New Delhi) which shows female literacy rate for certain Zou villages – Tangpijol at 15.28%, Behiang at 38. 08%, Tuaitengphai at 56. 96%, etc.
In spite of being confronted by such social facts, the leaders of Zou community are in a state of denial. They pretend that, by now, everyone must have had functional literacy enough to read the Bible, hymnals and the local newspapers. The Church also turns a deaf ear to the suggestion that Sunday Schools could be reformed as an effective tool for spreading basic literacy. In the social history of both Wales and Mizoram, Sunday Schools played an important role in providing “Bible-based literacy” to women, children and deprived adults. But in Manipur today, somehow Sunday Schools have been strangely equated with boring “Bible studies” which falsely assume the audience to be universally literate. With a general literacy of only 61%, almost half of the Zou population is handicapped by illiteracy to participate in any intelligent discussion of religious or secular issues. Till now, the ugliness of this social scourge has been either unrecognized or grossly ignored by the vanguards of the Zou society. As Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid!” in 1992, we need to realize today, “It’s basic education, stupid!”
It is high time to take stock of the situation, and do something – at least in the context of Church’s literary mission to spread the Word in the world. Christianity is basically a religion of the written word than oral tradition; it is a religion oriented to mass literacy than illiteracy. For it is written, and even printed – but not spoken: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (St. John 1:1).
Carving a Niche for Protestant Mission Schools
Unlike Catholic missionary schools, the Protestant schools have not yet taken their educational endeavors seriously. While the Catholics carefully select strategic locations to start new schools and hostels, the Protestants wastefully spread their limited human and financial resources thinly in many villages. Apparently a number of such mission schools are meant to appease the sentiments of certain village chiefs or local church leaders. Often the real objective is not to provide basic “quality education” for all. This skepticism is justified by the fact that the “Education Boards” of our mission schools are usually constituted by people with little or no professional competence. It is unimaginable how such an education board could identify – let alone attract – teaching talent in our school system.
As a matter of fact, running primary school is no less demanding than running institutions of higher education. But professional service or qualified educationists do not come free of cost. Without handsome pay package or other incentives, it will be difficult to attract high quality teachers – especially graduates with a good command of English and other “transferable skills.” The single most important catalyst required to reform any school system is quality teacher. A recent research shows that investing in quality teachers is more profitable than investing in school infrastructure.
At present, it will be impossible to maintain some of the existing schools which show poor performance. Then, how do we ensure that everyone gets functional literacy in remote villages? A possible solution lies in reforming the Sunday School by gearing it toward total literacy mission, and investing in the training of its teachers. It may even be possible to attempt something like the current “Teach for India” project initiated in 2007, and run by volunteers responding to the publicity generated by the national media. This is modeled on Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America (TFA). Meanwhile, it will be necessary to invest a substantial part of our Education Board’s resources in the establishment of Education Vouchers (scholarships) meant for talented pupils hailing especially from rural areas. The logic is to fund promising students, not sick schools. So, funding rural students instead of mission schools may go a long way in providing educational opportunities to the largest number of children.
Functional Private Schools vis-à-vis Failing Public Schools
Is the popularity of private fee-charging schools in Manipur to be explained by their superior quality? Elite private education is always considered to be the privilege of a few, and any suggestion that it might be there to serve the poor would be scoffed at. Not all private schools, however, boast of qualified staff and infrastructure comparable to state-funded schools. But the private institutions are generally more accountable: ‘the teachers are accountable to the manager (who can fire them), and, through him or her, to the parents (who can withdraw their children)’. The salaries of private-school teacher in rural India are typically less than one-fifth the salary of regular public-school teachers. In spite of their lower salary, dedicated private teachers tend to product better results than trained Government teachers.
It is not difficult, therefore, to understand why even the poor quit free public schools, and vote with their feet to move their children to low-cost private schools. In fact, these students are refugees from a failing state system. Impressively, many private schools offer fee waivers for deserving students from deprived families. Private unaided schools are doing a better job at educating children at lower cost than the government system. Indeed, it's remarkable how many low-cost private schools manage to do more with less. Sponsored by the Indian government The Public Report on Basic Education in India (The PROBE Team, 1999) indicates that private schools in India are ‘more effective and less costly’ than their public counterparts at improving the mathematical performance of students.
Even during the days of the British Raj, private mission schools in the hills of Manipur surpassed the Government schools in the valley. Reporting on the Ukhrul Mission Schools, Rev. William Pettigrew in 1923 said: “The President of the Darbar visited our Ukhrul School … and has every good reason for thinking that the boys passing … have a better knowledge than the State school scholars.”2 Will it be possible to replicate the results of the private sector in government schools? Or, can this phenomenon be leveraged to improve educational opportunities for all children via adoption of Education Vouchers?
Educational Entrepreneurship and the Spirit of Self-Help
Based on his study of “The Enterprise of Education,” James Tooley (2001) drew this conclusion: If state schools aren’t working, “exit” is a viable option. Without the incentives and accountability of the private sector, Tooley doubts whether public schools will be able to replicate the success of the former. There is a growing catalogue of Government schools that have been ‘fresh-started’, only to be given up on in despair of ever really improving. Politicians usually are neither willing nor able to fix this longstanding problem. More state intervention also may crowd out any last traces of educational enterprise. The more government intervenes, the more it crowds out this spirit of self-help.
The spirit of self-help can be seen in the most hostile environment. In the slums and villages of India provide several stories of educational entrepreneurs, prompted by community concern as well as business acumen. At present, socialist sentiments of the Government and the public have several prejudices against alternative approaches to education. Tooley (2001) suggests that what is needed perhaps is the creation of a chain of ‘budget-priced’ private schools. Such an alternative system will allow those trapped in mediocre government ‘sink’ schools to escape. Ultimately, it is not a question of privatisation or not – but how to make quality private schools accessible to poor families.
A Case for Education Vouchers, Competition and Incentives
An Education Voucher scheme is a coupon or a cheque provided by a Government to students to enable them to attend a school of their own choice. A voucher may be either universal or targeted – that is, for all children, or for particularly targeted groups. Universal vouchers are adopted by Chile in 1980 (Larrañaga, 1997) and Sweden in 1992. Targeted vouchers schemes are enacted in countries as diverse as the USA, Bangladesh, New Zealand and Columbia. In the US, the Milwaukee Parent Choice Programme was introduced in 1990 as a targeted voucher scheme for low-income families to attend private schools (Witte 2000). The Cleveland voucher scheme followed suit in 1995. An alternative ‘targeted voucher’ called Florida A+ Education Plan has been tried in Florida in June 1999. This became the first statewide voucher project to be implemented in the USA. The idea is that schools will improve their performance owing to the fear of being shamed into closing or loosing students and revenue.
The basic idea of an Education Voucher is that the government would fund students instead of schools and that the money would follow the student and get paid to whichever school that the child chooses to enroll in. The scheme will fund deserving students – not failing schools. It will make parents and pupils ‘free to choose’ either private or public schools. The key idea behind a voucher system is not an ideological predisposition towards either private or public schools, but rather the belief that competition can be a force for improving both public and private schools. Thus, the claim is not that all private schools are superior to government schools. Rather, the aim is to think about ways of providing the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of society with the same set of choices faced by their better-off counterparts. This is exactly what a voucher or scholarship would do. Providing every child an opportunity to go to a school of their choice will not only expand the set of choices open to the poor, but also force the government schooling system to improve in order to be viable (Sexton 2002; Muralidharan 2006).
The attractiveness of such a system is that it harnesses the power of incentives and competition while avoiding the biggest weakness of the market to caters only to those with purchasing power. A school voucher puts purchasing power in the hands of every parent, and is thus likely to be a deeply empowering experience (Kelkar 2006). A voucher system also provides the right incentives for schools to not only enroll children but to prevent drop outs (since the voucher money goes with the child). Schools will have the right incentives to hire the best teachers, hold them accountable, and be responsive to parents’ needs (Muralidharan 2006). Conventional experience teaches us that competition makes for a better delivery of goods and services than monopolies. This point is beautifully conveyed by an African poem (Friedman 2006: 137):
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.
Addressing Concerns about Education Vouchers
While voucher-based systems hold a lot of promise, there are certainly a range of concerns with such a model – some well founded, and others less so. One of the less well-founded (but common) reactions to the idea of vouchers is an emotional response that equates Education Voucher with an abdication on the part of the Government of its duty to provide universal quality education. However, the idea of vouchers does not in any way deny that it is ultimately the state’s responsibility to ensure that all children are educated and that nobody is left behind. The key distinction is that while it is clearly the state’s responsibility to finance and regulate schools, it is not at all clear whether it should be in the actual business of running sick schools. The state would thus in no way be absolved of its responsibility of “ensuring” universal basic education of high quality. Recent cross-country research shows that the best educational outcomes appear to be obtained by systems that combine public financing and private management in education – which is exactly the kind of public-private partnership that a voucher program would be (Sandstrom & Bergstrom 2002; Muralidharan 2006).
Concluding Remarks
The point is not to claim that Education Vouchers can be a “silver bullet” solution that will solve all our educational woes overnight. Rather it should be thought of as an especially promising idea among a range of policy options we have to improve the quality of education. To begin with, the pilot voucher project can also be initiated by Protestant mission schools in Manipur to rationalize the use of their limited resources in remote villages. Sunday Schools too can contribute to the success of the total literacy mission especially in interior villages. At present, there is much wastage due to duplication of work by mission schools operating without economies of scale. There is room for cooperation, coordination and pooling of resources between the different denominations of the Zou Christians. Since quality teacher constitutes the most important element of school reform, our Education Boards need to look for teaching talent beyond our narrow domestic walls. Though uttered in a different context, the words of Winston Churchill here rings true, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to try and find a successful outcome acceptable to all that counts.”
Select Bibliography
- Friedman, Thomas L. (2006) The World is Flat, London/New York: Penguin Books.
- Kelkar, Vijay (2006) "Let Every Parent Be a Consumer," India Today. January 16.
Larrañaga, Oswaldo, (1997) ‘Chile: A Hybrid Approach’, in Zuckerman, Elaine and de Kadt, Emanuel (eds) The Public-private Mix in Social Services: Health care and education in Chile, Costa Rica and Venezuela, Washington DC: Inter-American Development Bank. - Muralidharan, Karthik (2006) “Public-Private Partnerships for Quality Education in India”, Seminar, Issue 565, September 2006.
- The PROBE Team (1999) Public Report on Basic Education in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Tooley, James (2001) The Enterprise of Education Opportunities and Challenges for India, Delhi: Liberty Institute.
Footnote:
1 Census of India 2001: Manipur – The Scheduled Tribes, Office of the Registrar General, India.
2 CBCNEI Office, Guwahati, Assam, “Educational Report for 1923” (cyclostyled) by Rev. William Pettigrew. Also in Elungkiebe Zeliang (2005) History of Christianity in Manipur: Source Materials, Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre.
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