Recalibrating Quality of Education: A Study of Rural-Urban Schools in Uttar Pradesh
摘要
For safeguarding dignity of the rural, a dive into the waters of ‘what quality of education is being maintained and offered here’ becomes imperative. Since antiquity, quality of education has been enumerated by variables which are easily commensurable and comparable, like literacy rates, enrolment ratios, retention rates, drop-out rates, gender-parity ratios, pupil-teacher ratio, attendance, vacancies, number and types of schools and teachers, availability of basic amenities, and learning outcomes. Many of the metrices, like HDI, EDI, UDISE, ASER, NAS and QMT, (Human Development Index, Education Development Index, Unified District Information System for Education (National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration), Annual Status of Education Report (Pratham), National Achievement Survey and Quality Monitoring Tools (National Council of Educational Research and Training)) principally hinge on indicators that are either input- or end product-oriented. They try to either map the adequacy of provisioning within schools, in terms of teaching-learning material and infrastructure, or ascertain the learning outcomes of students. What seems to be missing from these is something I like to address as ‘descriptive’ indicators. These indicators are relatively process-oriented and provide an in-depth view of educational processes within institutions, with due emphasis on interactions between primary stakeholders, i.e. students-teachers, and their performance on prescribed variables derived from national educational programmes. Being process-oriented, such variables try to bring out the understanding of dignity and quality in rural and urban spaces. In pursuit of the same, this chapter depicts how descriptive indicators were unearthed from four nationally implemented policies, and then quality of education, in rural and urban schools, was subsequently indicated. This exploratory study therefore tests the applicability of a novel version of quality of education (through pedagogical intervention) on schools in urban and rural spaces, within Uttar Pradesh.