The Central Advisory Board of Education will be meeting today
to discuss the following points
1.Whether the CCE (Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation
), should be scrapped in the 9th and 10th Classes , and
whether the Board Exams should be reintroduced again .
2.Whether to do away with the “No DetentionPolicy” in schools
3.Whether to extend the 25 percent reservations for the
economically weaker sections to pre primary and secondary classes .
My views on the CCE have been very clear from the beginning.
It’s a no nothing policy and leads to a huge amount of file work .The teacher
is reduced to a clerk ,maintaining mark lists and grades of very complicated “tools”
for Formative Tests as well as maintaining registers and computer records for
Summative Exams .I have always felt and argued that in the education system ,teaching
must form the bulk of the process –rather than the assessments.In one school
which I headed ,I noticed that out of 180 teaching days -65 days were reserved
for assessments !! (they had 5 exams in a year !!).I immediately reduced it to
3 ,thus giving the teachers 26 days more for teaching .The results in the board
exams showed a phenenmonal increase –from a average aggregate of 75 it jumped
to 82 .!!There was no magic involved –just a bit of commonsense .I just placed
the horse ahead of the cart and not the other way around .
The CCE similarly bogs the teachers in a huge pile of
records .Come on –let them teach .Dont convert them into babus .Apart from that
,the CCE IN THE 10TH GRADE has spawned a culture of manipulation
.Since all the assessments and evaluation are “inhouse”
and since some tools of assessments ( for example speaking ,projects etc) ,are
subjectively judged and no tangible criterion are there ,schools fall into a
trap !! They aim to give lots of marks to kids and try to compete with other
schools on the basis of how many kids
get a CGPA OF 10 .Sometimes out of 200 kids -180 get CGPA of 10 !!!.One
Principal went on Facebook and pasted a photograph showing herself eating a rasmalai at a legendary sweet house and
commenting “ Enjoying ras malai in celebration of 90 percent of children
getting a score of 10 CGPA” . Congratulations and “likes” were splashed all over . Very good !! The
tragedy struck 2 years later when the same kids were assessed by the CBSE -5 of
the kids with 10 CGPA got compartments,
a nd 3 failed .Obviously they were not the 10 CGPA types but had to be allotted
Science and Maths because “technically” they were brilliant!! .
This twin cancer of too much assessment and manipulation
,must be done away with .Otherwise ,we are looking down at the barrel of the
gun .
I am also not a great fan of the “no detention” case .I
think children have differentiated learning patterns and even after extra efforts if a child is not able to cope with
the curriculum –he must be given the “privilege” to repeat the class .It can
only do him good .
As far as extending the reservations of seats (25 percent ),
I feel very strongly that that’s not the job of the private schools .The
government must do its job of running the government schools much better .There
is no reason why it cant –the teachers and Principals are paid better than the
private school teachers and Principal ,the government has lots of avenues to
raise finances (private schools can only do so by raising the fees), we pay
taxes for these services –so where is the problem ? Now don’t tell me that the
government compensates the private schools by giving them “ vouchers” for the education of these 25 percent kids .I
am in it , and I know how much schools get –PEANUTS !!Only monkeys can live on
peanuts !!
