A second reason for not drawing on SSA as a model is that it needs too long for educational quality — based on any sense of enhancing students’ capabilities — to even become an issue, much less the driving issue. The “access axis” plays a particularly clever circular trick: they define quality based on the inputs they want to finance — better physical facilities, more teacher training, smaller class sizes, higher wages for teachers — and then show they have been successful in focusing on and improving quality. Again, the only people who do not benefit from this trick are the children whose lack of early acquisition of fundamentals dooms their life chances.

There is a third sense it would be reckless to take all aspects of SSA as a success to be replicated. Costs matter. India has myriad pressing needs and every rupee spent on something is a rupee not spent on something important — more food, better roads, improved health. By all calculations, to produce a lower quality of primary education costs the standard public sector primary, on average, roughly twice as much as it can be done in either the private sector or by community schools. This is primarily because the pay of teachers in government (and aided) schools are enormously higher than in private schools — without any better, and often much worse, performance. So even if SSA did produce additional enrolment, it almost did so at too high a cost.

This is not to say India should not do something about secondary education, it must and should, as it is badly in need of updating to meet 21st-century challenges, but India should not copy SSA and focus on favoured expansion of the public system through a Centrally designed scheme, nor draw on “international best practices” sold to it by education “experts”. Rather India should address secondary education in new and creative ways drawing on the current strengths of the Indian secondary education: a federal system that allows states to take leadership and produce innovations, a mixed system in which an array of providers exist on equal footing (and could receive equal support by making support to students, not schools), and a performance-oriented system in which learning matters.

... contd.