Kejriwal vs Himanta Biswa Sarma: Who runs better schools? The answer is here

Recently, a social media war erupted between Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma over the state of government schools in their respective states. The Twitter spat was triggered by Assam government’s decision to shut down 34 government schools where not a single student could pass the High School Leaving Certificate (HSLC) examination—10th board examination—conducted by the Secondary Education Board of Assam. Taking a dig at this decision, Kejriwal said that shutting down schools was not a solution and government should work towards improving the quality of education in schools.

Assam CM Sarma responded by saying that he—earlier as Assam education minister—opened four times more schools in Assam between 2013—the year Kejriwal became Delhi CM—and 2022 than Delhi currently has. While there is no end to these political debates, the state of learning in the country’s schools can be gauged from the results of the National Achievement Survey (NAS), a national level large-scale assessment conducted to obtain information about the learning achievement of students of classes 3, 5, 8 and 10 studying in state government schools, government aided schools, private unaided schools and Central government schools. The NAS 2021—second such exercise after the first one conducted in 2017—was released earlier this year in May.

The two surveys, however, doesn’t reflect any superlative performance by the students at the government-run schools in Delhi. In fact, barring all subjects in class 10 and language in class 8, government schools in Delhi score lesser than the national average. On the other hand, government schools in Assam score above the national average, and that of Delhi, in all subjects from class 3 to class 8. Assam’s government schools scores above Delhi in mathematics even in class 10. So, Delhi’s good performance, when it comes to learning outcome, is restricted to only class 10.

While Assam has 47,155 government schools compared to just 2,767 in Delhi, the northeastern state also has better pupil-teacher ratio than in the national capital. So, it can conclusively said that, though Assam doesn’t score well in learning outcomes of students of class 10, the numbers don’t support Kejriwal’s claim of running the ideal schools in the country.

The government school infrastructure

State	Number of government schools	Number of students	Number of teachers
Delhi	2,767	24,09,441	81,807
Assam	47,155	50,31,895	2,18,676

Source: UDISE+ 2019-20

 

Pupil teacher ratio—the number of students for every teacher

	Primary (1-5)	Upper primary (6-8)	Secondary (9-10)	Higher Secondary (11-12)
India	26.5	18.5	18.5	26.1
Delhi	32.7	29.3	27.6	17.9
Assam	21.6	13.6	11	16

Source: UDISE+ 2019-20

How the three states scored in the National Achievement Survey

Class 3

Subject	National average 2021	Delhi’s Score 2021	Delhi’s score 2017	Assam’s score 2021	Assam’s score 2017
Language	323	285	316	328	351
Mathematics	305	269	299	318	338
Environmental Studies	308	278	303	315	332

Class 5

Subject	National average 2021	Delhi’s Score 2021	Delhi’s score 2017	Assam’s score 2021	Assam’s score 2017
Language	302	284	303	306	323
Mathematics	280	256	287	291	334
Environmental Studies	279	257	292	291	328

Class 8

Subject	National average 2021	Delhi’s Score 2021	Delhi’s score 2017	Assam’s score 2021	Assam’s score 2017
Language	285	290	299	278	298
Mathematics	248	235	244	251	283
Science	240	235	248	237	289
Social Science	247	235	258	254	294

Class 10

Subject	National average 2021	Delhi’s Score 2021	Assam’s score 2021
MIL	244	278	248
Mathematics	210	211	218
Science	195	206	194
Social Science	220	229	217
English	267	289	257