Indian schools dwarfed in global ratings programme

"The mean performance of students in Tamil Nadu-India was not significantly different to those of students in Panama and Peru. The mean performance of students in Himachal Pradesh-India was statistically the same as that of students in Kyrgyzstan," notes the report, released by the Australian Council for Educational Research.

The poor performance on learning abilities, however, should not be that surprising. Independent assessments within the country have repeatedly emphasised poor learning abilities. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) brought out annually by the NGO Pratham is one such assessment. The 2010 report noted that overall, after five years of schooling, close to 50 per cent of children are at a level lower than what is expected after two years in school. It had revealed that across the country, the ability of children to deal with elementary arithmetic has declined. A large percentage of middle school children struggled in their everyday dealings with numbers, such as reading a calendar, estimating volume or calculating area and so on.

PISA assessments first started in 2000 but India participated for the first time in PISA 2009+, with the 16,000 students drawn from some 400 schools across the two states. The 10 participants in PISA 2009+ were assessed in 2010. PISA 2009+ involved over 46,000 students across these 10 economies, representing a total of about 1,377,000 15-year-olds.

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