The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Panel wants teachers to write competency test

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jul 22, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Panel wants teachers to write competency test

Bageshree S.

Says this needs to be done at all levels before promotion

Study says teachers spend about 32 per cent of their time in non-academic work
Committee warns against posting teachers near their hometowns

Bangalore: Do teachers in Government schools stagnate academically once they join service?

Though the answer to this question may be an emphatic “no” from the teaching fraternity, Karnataka State Education Perspective Plan Committee believes that this is a fact to be taken note of.

The committee, chaired by Director of the Department of Public Instruction D. Jagannatha Rao, has quoting the Perspective Plan for Education submitted recently to the Government said: “It is absolutely necessary to create a mechanism to improve the quality of teachers and link their professional performance with monetary benefits for which they are eligible.”

It also recommends that a competency-based test be conducted at each level in promotions.

Focus on academics

The final report, which places a special emphasis on school quality assessment, says that improving teacher efficiency is of utmost importance in achieving this. It also takes serious note of teacher absenteeism (21.7 per cent in the State) and highlights the fact that only about 32 per cent of even the time spent in school is spent on non-academic work.

The committee has come up with a series of recommendations to ensure that teachers spend more doing the primary job of teaching. It says that the department should stop using teachers’ services for departmental work, take up census and such other enumeration work that involves teachers only during school holidays and review the practice of using primary school teachers for 10th Standard invigilation.

Transfers

The committee also suggests some drastic changes in the policy on teacher transfers.

“Every year the transfer policy is being framed keeping in mind the needs of teachers only and not the needs of schools,” it notes. “The use of political influence by teachers in transfers has reached alarming proportions,” it says. With teachers preferring to teach only in towns, many remote schools are without teachers, it adds.

The committee warns of the dangers of posting teachers near their hometowns, which results in them neglecting school work and engaging in local politics and taking up additional professions such as shop-keeping. It recommends that block officers should do a school mapping and fix the number of posts in each school every year.

Training

The committee has dedicated a chapter in the final report to teacher education, and notes that training methodology has “by and large remained the same during the past several decades”, with an emphasis on “theory which is not related to realities in the field”. Rather than issue no objection certificates to more teacher training institutes, the existing ones should be streamlined and strengthened, it recommends. The committee says: “The raising aspirations of parents to get good quality education (especially English education) for their children, has made the task of the teacher more demanding.”

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