Would you like to attend? We are going over
Regards
Vidya Shankar
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Dear Friends:
I'd like to invite you to a seminar at IFMR. The particulars are below. I hope you will be able to come. Please feel free to forward it to others, if it is of interest. Thanks,
Pritha
TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY AND LOCAL POLITICS IN INDIA
Tara Beteille, Stanford University, March 2008
11 am - 12:30 am, Monday, March 24, 2008
at Lakshmi Hall
IFMR
IFMR Trust
24 Kothari Road Chennai 600034
Pritha Gopalan, Ph.D.
Education Fellow
IFMR Trust
24 Kothari Road
Chennai 600034
Phone: 44 28303543
Mobile: 9884493517
Email: pritha.gopalan@ifmrtrust. co.in
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Abstract of her paper
TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY AND LOCAL POLITICS IN
INDIA Tara Beteille,
, March 2008 Stanford University
has one of the highest rates of teacher absenteeism in the world. Over 90 percent of the government's education budget is spent on paying teachers, yet, on average, 25 percent of them are absent on any given school day. Not surprisingly, approximately 52 percent of school-going children in rural India aged 7 -14 years cannot read material meant for 7 year olds. India Why are such high rates of teacher absence tolerated? Dismissing or suspending errant teachers might be a solution, but this rarely happens in
, even when teachers are in surplus. Alternative measures, including putting new teachers on performance- India based terminable annual contracts, have not been successful. One reason for these failures could be that policy has not paid sufficient attention to the role of other stakeholders, including bureaucrats, politicians and parents in tolerating high teacher absence. In this paper, I argue that strategic linkages between teachers and politicians could potentially compromise teacher accountability policies; further, these links tend to be more active in low-literacy regions. I show that politicians frequently use teachers for building political capital — an attractive option since schoolteachers are among the few educated people present in every village in
. In return, teachers expect favors, including reduced teaching accountability and tolerance of absenteeism. Even if only some teachers maintain political connections and can subvert rules, they create an environment of laxity. This induces a free-rider situation allowing other teachers to get away with absences, thereby frustrating accountability policies. I use recently-collected primary data on teachers' political networks in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, to uncover a system of relations that potentially explains teacher accountability and absence in democratic developing countries such as India . The data include 2400 teacher-surveys, as well as interviews and focus-group discussions with politicians, teachers and government officials in these states. I supplement the analysis with secondary data on teacher absence from 237 nationally representative administrative districts. By investigating the underlying structure governing the motivations of teachers within and outside schools, this paper throws light on why accountability policies fail in certain settings — and what we must address to change this. India
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