India closes 34 schools After All Students Fail Exams.
Critics called a local government’s decision to close 34 schools in India’s northeastern state “illogical,” and “senseless” after none of their students passed a graduation exam this year.
Students from Assam took the HSLC exam. Over 1,000 students from 34 closed schools failed the exam.
Parents and teachers blamed COVID-19 lockdowns for poor results, but the Assam government closed 34 schools—mostly in rural areas—and sent students to better-performing schools nearby.
Assam’s education minister, Ranoj Pegu, said, “If a school fails to educate children and students fail HSLC, it’s pointless to keep running the school.”
“The government cannot spend taxpayer’s money for schools with zero success record.”
Two thousand five hundred more schools are being evaluated, and more may be closed for “performance-related reasons,” sources say.
Teachers and education activists blamed Assam’s poor infrastructure for the crisis.
“By shutting down the schools, the government is handing out collective punishment to the students and teachers.
"They should have rather conducted a survey in all government schools to find out why exactly the students performed badly,” Bhupen Sarma, a teacher and educationist in Assam told VOA.
Following the survey, the government should have adopted policies to improve school infrastructure.
In the past six years, 6,000 government elementary schools in Assam have closed.
The government said these schools closed because few students attended.
Sarma said “poor infrastructure” closed these elementary schools.
Sarma said some schools had no teachers, and others had one for five grades.
Since the government kept the elementary schools’ infrastructure in poor shape, most families avoided them, and the government closed 6,000 schools.
Many students’ coursework was disrupted during the COVID-19 lockdowns, especially in rural areas. Sarma said this is one reason students from 34 schools performed poorly on the HSLC exam.
“The government high schools in Assam’s rural areas often lack teachers.” This factor might have also contributed to the failure of the students in the HSLC exams,“ he said.
Instead of addressing students’ exam failures, they closed the schools.
After the government responded to activists’ Right to Information request, it was revealed that of Assam’s 3,221 schools, 341 had no teachers.
Souvik Ghoshal, a high school teacher in West Bengal, said that during COVID-19 lockdowns, many students couldn’t study well, which may have contributed to the failure of Assam students.
"Most poor and lower middle-class families send their children to government schools in India. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, almost all schools switched to online mode, and most children in government schools — especially in rural areas — couldn’t afford smart phones,” Ghoshal told VOA.
Few government school students could regularly attend online classes during lockdowns, despite having smartphones in their families.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, only 24% of urban students regularly attended online classes, according to a survey from last year.
Rural students had only 8% regular access to online classes.
Mahmud Hossain, a teacher in Assam’s Barpeta district, blamed a teacher shortage for poor student performance.
Hossain says Most teachers are posted in urban areas, so the teacher shortage worsens in rural areas, where students perform poorly in exams.
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According to India’s National Education Policy 2020, every school’s pupil-teacher ratio should be below 30:1.
In areas with many poor students, the PTR should be under 25:1.
In Assam’s rural schools, the PTR is 150:1, Sarma said.
Over 70% of Assam’s elementary and high school students attend government schools, where the infrastructure is better, said Sharma.
India closes 34 schools After All Students Fail Exams
