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Using vouchers to break shackles of education

The core of the problem can be traced back to the intrinsic flaw of our education system: focusing only on the quantity of education and ignoring quality. Though 96.83 per cent of children are enrolled in schools across India, these numbers seem meaningless to a country with abysmally low learning results.

Using vouchers to break shackles of education

Representational Image (iStock photo)

India, home to the largest adolescent and youth population, has not developed an effective method to utilize its most valuable asset: its youth. The set of individuals that would place India in the front row towards achieving its ambitious goal of becoming a five trillion dollar economy has been systematically neglected, with 63 per cent of Indians between 20 and 24 being unemployed.

To understand what holds them back, we must look at the root of the problem: an issue of quantity over quality. The core of the problem can be traced back to the intrinsic flaw of our education system: focusing only on the quantity of education and ignoring quality. Though 96.83 per cent of children are enrolled in schools across India, these numbers seem meaningless to a country with abysmally low learning results.

With less than 30 per cent of third graders being able to read a simple paragraph of grade 1 difficulty and hardly half the students entering high school having basic arithmetic ability, our youth kick off their education with alarmingly weak foundations. Disadvantaged groups tend to face the short end of the stick regarding educational outcomes. The government has launched various schemes and programmes to overcome these challenges, but they haven’t seen a penetrable impact.

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With the NEP 2020, the system’s rigidity has been firmly challenged. Yet it is up for debate to overhaul traditional education with other education systems, one being the voucher system. The school voucher system is a mechanism for governments to change how they fund the education of disadvantaged groups.

A government-issued coupon pays the full or partial cost of education at the student’s preferred school, public or private. The schools collect student vouchers, deposit them in their bank accounts, and the banks credit the school accounts with the corresponding amount while debiting the government’s budget. Simply put, the money follows to the student instead of the school. This system helps empower students with less access to resources to attend schools of their choice.

If a school doesn’t meet their expectations, they can choose a different one, enabling the equality of opportunity and freedom of choice. Vouchers also help create healthy competition– by placing all schools on an equal platform to compete; they have to guarantee a minimum quality of education to earn enrolments from children. The system has been implemented in Andhra Pradesh, and the results speak for themselves.

Students who won vouchers spent more time in school and outperformed non-winners drastically, specifically in subjects such as Social Studies, Physics, and Hindi. We are currently pumping money into a system that readily provides poor-quality education. Simply cutting down a government teacher’s salary and redirecting that amount to a voucher-based system can provide the freedom of a child to have a say in the quality of the education they receive.

It will still leave public teachers with a lump sum of Rs 20,000 on top of the money that the vouchers would credit. However, reforming the existing system has been challenging as teacher unions stand in the way. They work across states to help mobilize voting lists and campaigns in remote areas, making public school teachers’ voices incredibly valuable to politicians. The system places all the power with the producer (the schools) instead of the consumer (the students).

A voucher system would challenge this politically-influenced rigid system and hold public teachers accountable. On the other hand, the voucher system faces its fair share of skepticism. The first body of criticism stems from the belief that competitive markets are unsuitable for educational institutions. The current system isn’t a competitive market as government schools are propped up by the government and aren’t placed in the market of private schools.

Additionally, government-funded scholarships would not establish a truly free education market but would instead perpetuate reliance on government funding and regulation, to the continued detriment of families. When we put facts against speculation, we see that these concerns about the voucher system are misplaced.

Various public and private body studies have seen incontrovertible evidence towards the voucher system’s advantage. It has been successfully integrated into educational systems across the globe, from countries with a clear economic divide, such as Bangladesh and Colombia, to industrial countries such as the United States.

Before this ground-level issue affecting the majority of our population boils over, it’s in our hands to ensure that the future of India is guaranteed an education that would enable them rather than obstruct them. Action towards ensuring equitable education, regardless of financial background, would serve as the pivot towards how our children and society move forward into the future.

(The writer is a student at VIT, Vellore and a Writing Fellow at the Fellowship for Freedom in India)

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