Deccan Herald, December 09, 2004

School, staff to come under quality audit

BY VIJESH KAMATH

The entire model is in place, but the state is now awaiting the appointment of a Minister for Primary Education for final approval and Cabinet clearance.

*Opinion survey of parents to gauge school functioning.
*School managements’ tools aimed at accountability.
*Assessment report cards for schools every two years along with standard indicators of educational outcomes.

Well, we are not talking about any high sounding project here, but a grassroot-level programme in store for every school in the state. Each of the 60,000 government, aided and primary schools will be covered by a special quality assurance programme to assist school development and learning enhancement.
On the cards is the setting up of the Karnataka School Quality Assurance Organisation (KSQAO), a first of its kind initiative in India, which will function as a “quality-watch” body drawing upon expertise available in and outside the system.

Once cleared by the State cabinet, the organisation will set in motion a system of monitoring to ensure that every school, government or private, maintains minimum expected standards and also effectively implements improvement plans.
“We plan to cover 32 schools in each educational block during the first phase of the project and then extend it to over 100 schools in each block during the second phase,” D Jagannatha Rao, Director, Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT), told Deccan Herald. All schools in the state will be covered within two to three years, he added. The story of this project goes back to last year when the World Bank appointed Dr Alcyone Vasconceios Saliba, a consultant, to study similar type organisations existing in various countries and present a suitable model for setting up a quality assurance unit in the State.

Dr Saliba was accommodated in the office of the DSERT, Bangalore and provided assistance to interact with a wide variety of groups working in the field of primary and secondary education - teachers, academicians, teacher educators, school development and monitoring committee members, parents, NGOs and administrators - working at various levels.

Based on the interaction, Dr Saliba finalised a model best suited for the state. According to this model, KSQAO will be a separate organisation within the Education Department, functioning under the Commissioner for Public Instruction and will have three thematic units - testing, survey and statistics.

The KSQAO will prepare and disseminate school report cards for all elementary schools every two years, plus consolidated reports for all districts and the state as a whole. It would also gauge school functioning through opinion surveys of parents, measure student learning and flow through standardised testing of classes five to seven, followed by computation of statistical indicators.