The talking point today is about Meghalaya’s ghost schools, respectably termed as “too many schools” by no less than the respected “The Hindu” newspaper. This news which says 206 schools have zero enrolment while 2269 others have fewer than 10 students must shock the readers. With a population that hovers around 30 lakhs, Meghalaya has 14,582 schools. Manipur with a population close to that of Meghalaya has 4617 schools while Tripura with a population of nearly 37 lakh people has only 4629 schools. For Meghalaya this is not a new phenomenon. It was known since at least 25-30 years ago that schools were set up on political whims and not on the real needs of the respective constituencies. Any attempt to shut down such schools which have been a drain on the economy were met with stiff resistance from politicians who in turn instigated the village authorities to resist any move to shut down schools with zero enrolment.
In Meghalaya, moreover, 29% of schools are government aided while at the national level the figure stands at only 5%. However, the reason for such a bloated figure for the number of schools is also because there are too many categories of schools in Meghalaya ranging from Ad-hoc to Deficit, to Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan etc., and the same school might be availing one grant for the primary section and other grants for the High and Higher Secondary sections. Hence one school would figure on several lists. Attempts to rationalise the system have met with repeated failure.
Now that the Chief Minister has himself come to grips with the disturbing realities and the poor educational outcomes even in schools with proper student-teacher ratios, he will have to take strict measures to firstly hold to account those that have been running the ghost schools and permanently shut them down. The Government has to have the moral authority to let go of the teachers who have subsisted on salaries for decades without teaching. This might perhaps inject a new governance structure in the education department. What ails education today and in the past is the complete lack of government supervision firstly on schools wholly owned by the government and on those that receive government grants for paying teachers’ salaries. There has to be an accountability system in place. Permanency of teachers’ tenures is what kills educational enterprise. Once a teacher is employed by the government, that teacher continues in the job with an assured salary until retirement irrespective of the person’s performance. In private colleges and universities, students are asked to evaluate their teachers’ performances on several indicators. This is a pragmatic way of assessing a teacher. In fact, the practice in private schools and colleges currently is to employ teachers on contractual basis. Not every person with a BEd is necessarily an effective educator. The MDA Government has a challenging task at hand!
