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Clarion Call For School Reforms

  1 min 49 sec to read

Office of the controller of Examination recently published School Leaving Certificate (SLC) results with the pass percentage of 41.57 which is the lowest for the last eight years. This has further accentuated the question mark on our school education system.

According to the Ministry of Finance, the budget on education sector reached to Rs 63.91 billion in the current fiscal year from only Rs 27 million in the fiscal year 2006-07. Most of this money went to the public schools and they are the ones that fared badly also this year.

It is general knowledge that teachers at public schools are more active in politics and they are normally absent in the classrooms.

The solution may be running public schools in Principal-Agent Model in which the payoff to the principal depends on an action taken by the agent. The principal cannot contract for the action, but can compensate the agent based on some observable signal that is correlated with the action. Here the principals are parents of the students and the agents are the teachers. If these principals have rights to decide the pay offs (salary and perks) to the agents according to the observable signals (results and change in behaviours of students), the SLC results can be expected to improve significantly.

The fact that those public schools that are managed by the community have far better results consistently year after year lends further weight to this argument. The conclusion: Let’s hand over all public schools to the communities. Another problem related to SLC results is the frustration it causes to those who fail. This has resulted into cases of suicides as well. One solution to this is to speed up the implementation of the already adopted plan to make grade 12 exams as the school graduation level.

Next is to introduce a system of issuing certificates to the students on the basis of the number of subjects they have passed. If a student is good in fine arts but is weak in mathematics, he can be thus allowed to go to his profession without the stigma of ‘SLC failed’.

 

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