Start of healthier reforms in state’s education system

This gives many the hope that this healthy decision will pave the way for a slew of long-pending reforms in curriculum, academic process and in assessment systems  in Tamil Nadu. Taking a cue from the Central Board of Secondary Education, the State Education department passed on order stating the system of announcing “rankers”  had resulted in too much focus on top scores, paving way for unhealthy competition among schools. 

The State Education Secretary had gone on record that it would be an “unfair way of judging students through the prism of marks and that the ranking system had been misused and let to a lot of concerns.” 

Starting with the mid-90s, a small set of schools in Salem – Namakkal region started the unhealthy practice of taking “top rankers” of SSLC from other towns and schools in the State and this aggregation led to a situation where these schools started cornering all the toppers in the State at Class 12 level. This helped them create a whole brand and they used this branding to market themselves successfully, thus drawing a large number of parents to put their wards in these schools. Naturally, these institutions made a lot of money using the “rank” as a biggest attraction. Now with the government dropping the “ranks” and deciding to offer grades to differentiate entire groups of students as per their aggregate marks, these schools will start finding new marketing methods. 

However, the School Education department has to keep the initiative going. Already, the next good steps have been made public – that the syllabus would be revisited and improved in the next three years. 

One of the indirect fall out of the “rank” system, especially its misuse by a set of schools – whose number only seemed to increase in the last 10 years – was the discrimination and elitism that started creeping in. Students who were top rankers in SSLC or Class 10, would be bunched into one section and these schools would offer them the best of teachers and coaching and goad them to improving their performance so that they could become “rankers” and “toppers” in Class 12, which will the talking point of their next year’s academic brochure or key part of the websites to attract huge crowds of parents /students. 

The grading system could marginally improve the situation and put an end to the rat race – especially when students realise that whether they score 1180 or 1190 or 1200 out of 1200, they will all be treated on a par. 

The next step of curricular reforms now need to focus on the two oft-repeated points of any debate about school education in Tamil Nadu: move away from rote learning towards concept based learning; improve teaching – learning process; strengthen teacher education system and make the assessment more robust that knowledge, its application, analytics and critical thinking skills of the learners can all be tested, along with creative applications.