New Delhi: An official report on why our school teachers are not up to the mark is gathering dust in the HRD Ministry since it was submitted in April 2016 by the National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE), the teacher education regulator.
Almost 90% of the country's 17,000 teacher training colleges are the private institutions that hire mediocre teachers at low salaries and they give generous marking in the exams to pass a maximum number of candidates to teach in the schools.
The NCTE had appointed a panel headed by its former chairman MA Siddiqui to find out why over three-fourths of those passing BEd and diploma in teaching flunk in the Central Teacher Eligibility Test, mandatory for recruitment of the school teachers.
The Telegraph daily has dug out the panel's report that exposes why teacher training colleges have become money-making shops and recommends the closure of a large number of these colleges to avoid unhealthy competition and surplus passouts.
The panel had recommended establishment of the state-level bodies to fix a reasonable fee structure for these colleges as also decide reasonable salary to those teaching to produce the teachers, since it found that most of the colleges offer poor salaries that attracted only second rate teachers.
It’s report pointed out that these colleges set easy exam papers and award marks too liberally, allowing even first class to the below average students. Many of them even did not require the students to record 75% attendance.
Despite the poor CTET success rates, the number of the qualified teaching aspirants far outstrip the teaching jobs available. Ashok Agarwal, president of the All India Parents Association, an education campaigner, said the success rate of the would-be teachers was below 50% even in the state-level teacher eligibility tests.
He said most of these colleges were started by politicians and businessmen who have nothing to do with education. Neither the government nor NCTE tried to regulate them to ensure quality, he said.
