Thursday, June 14, 2007
Gujarat Innovating on Privatized Education
Gujarat is trying a new experiment in privatizing education, using public-private partnership. This should be interesting, and could likely improve the quality of education for tribals.
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2 comments:
Not a bad start, but the comment in the end by Madav Chavan is quite instructive (must be careful as that could be PSec)
Why fund one or two institution on a turnkey basis (including capital and operational costs)? The thing to do is
1- Increase education outlays in the state budget
2- Make private service providers COMPETE for government outlay.
Here are some goals that I would advocate for school education in India
1- Universal and free access
2- Mandated Minimal Curriculum (language, math & science)
3- Optional Curriculum (Yoga, prayers, vocational studies and sundry others) at the discretion of the service provider
4- Government reimburses only the expense (or a set maximum per student amount) involved in imparting mandatory curricula (hence castrating the leftie charge of producing "Hindu fundamentalist" at government expense)
5- Absolute and Complete parental discretion on which school they want to send their children to (i.e. you decide if your kid is to become a productive citizen or a Jehadi). Parents can also opt out of any elements of the Optional Curricula (i.e. as a Muslim you can still send your kid to an RSS run school but have him/her skip the Saraswati Vandana that 'hurts')
Rather than giving money to providers to build schools; give huge tax breaks to people that fund community schools. When the community is in charge of it's own money - the schools will be built cheaper I can assure you. Increased competition for government funding will ensure Optimal utilisation of resource for Operational Expenditure.
If this sounds too much like Milton Friedman's School voucher scheme - well I have supported it all along
The key is to not to make the government a money provider. They key is to make both the government and the parent a CONSUMER and the teaching institution a SERVICE PROVIDER
More on education - we should all read all these essays and the associated bibliographical material.
http://www.heritage.org/research/education/
Even Utah, which is full of what a friend once called "well-educated polygamous nutcases" gets it right when it comes to educating it's children
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/wm1362.cfm
The problem with doing this in India is two fold
1- Unionised absentee teachers - we will have to keep paying them while funding a parallel system
2- Free press radicals who will never allow unhindered debate and will cloak this as another attempt by 'revanchist' forces to spread their 'ignorance' - complete with hysterical tributes to 'Guru Shishya'tradition that is being trampled upon
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