Political lessons of AAP’s Delhi school model

One of the biggest puzzles about Indian politics is the near absence of political competition around public goods like education (and health) in the electoral battlefield. It simply does not get as much public debate as it deserves, This is particularly puzzling because Indians care deeply about education and recognise it as the path to better jobs and mobility.

India achieved near-universal enrolment in elementary education in the mid-2000s and it has stayed steady since; enrolment in secondary schools has been growing, as has the market for private schools and private tuitions. Between 2000 and 2022, the number of people with secondary education or higher levels doubled.

However, most students are receiving an education of shoddy quality. At the elementary level, as ASER reports repeatedly remind us, just about 50 per cent (pre-Covid) of students in Class V can read a Class II textbook. This figure increases at the secondary level. The intense competition and scandals around competitive exams for higher education and the increasing unemployment rates amongst educated youth in India are testimony to this.

India's education system is in urgent need for reform. Yet, in the rough and tumble of electoral promises, education rarely makes an appearance. While parties compete over subsidies and cash transfers, their silence on public goods like education is conspicuous.

This is where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi stood out. Soon after coming to power in 2015, the government announced its mission to ‘revolutionise’ education in Delhi. Despite the ups and downs through its decade in power, the party repeatedly deployed education as its key differentiator, the lynchpin of its "Delhi model". The party stood out because it made education an electoral issue.

Today, a lot of this is being lost in the ugliness that has become the norm in election campaigns. The AAP, too, is shifting focus. It is looking more like its peers, doling out direct benefit cash transfers to women and playing the Hindutva game.

Elections are a time to reflect on the big shifts that parties have engendered. The AAP's work on education was not without critique, but it was substantive. It offers a site to engage with the challenges of our education system.

For several years, I had the opportunity, along with a team of researchers, to observe AAP's education reforms as they unfolded in Delhi's elementary schools (classes VI-VIII). In a recently published book, 'Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi's Schools', we reflect on what we had learnt. Most discussions on Delhi's education revolution focus on enhanced budgetary provisions and improvements in school infrastructure.

But to me, what really stood out was the willingness to acknowledge and open a political dialogue on the fundamental challenge confronting the Indian education system: the obsession with mastering examinations through rote-learning. This is a system obsessed with syllabus-completion rather than subject-mastery, with the goal of ensuring that the best students are made exam-ready. For teachers, pass percentages are the key metric to which they are held accountable by both the school system and parents. Rote-learning is the primary means to this end.

I refer to this as the classroom consensus. It works for the best students, but for those left behind, the tyranny of syllabus completion and pass percentages has meant that the classroom simply does not cater to them. As Manish Sisodia, the architect of Delhi's school reforms, has said, the classroom is a victim of the curriculum, syllabus and textbooks.

Much of what the Delhi education revolution did was aimed at disrupting the classroom consensus by experimenting with ways to ensure that basic, foundational literacy and numeracy skills were imparted to all students. It included infrastructure upgradation, building a cadre of mentor teachers, improving in-service training and exposure visits around the world, infusing campaigns to build foundational literacy and numeracy skills, along with aligning classrooms within a grade according to student learning levels (how close students were to curriculum level expectations).

None of this was unchallenged. In schools, amongst teachers and educationists, questions were asked, debates held and ideas critiqued.

Moreover, versions of these reform ideas have been tried out in some other states and in different ways, but rarely as a political project and never for long enough to disrupt the classroom consensus.

Change was hard. There was confusion, resistance and active pushback at the school level. The spectre of syllabus-completion and examinations loomed, causing confusion in the messaging. Over time, a subtle but important shift took place. Consistent engagement was held with schools on the dynamics of the classroom. Teachers were exposed to different ways students could acquire basic skills outside the framework of the syllabus-examination nexus. Regular "missions" that focussed on improving basic literacy and numeracy were infused. All this shifted the conversation.

Teachers still spoke about students in terms of their exam-readiness, but now the gaps in student learning levels and the distance between curriculum expectations and the student in the last row of the classroom had entered the conversation, preparing the ground for a deeper change.

There are lessons in this package of reform efforts for other states on how to improve foundational literacy and numeracy in primary schools, which is a key goal of the Union government's New Education Policy, 2021.

Throughout the early years, a consistent attempt was made to make parent-teacher dialogue on student learning a routine through widely publicised mega parent-teacher meetings. Such engagement in government schools is rare.

The quality of the mega parent teacher meetings was variable, but the political support they received and the stated goal of shifting the societal dialogue on education was important and a first for India. With the AAP’s political battles in Delhi, the momentum for reforms in the government's second term slowed down.

But it is important to recognise that in a political culture where welfare obligations of the state have been reduced to cash handouts, where bigotry, hate and the worst forms of identity politics are the primary offerings that politicians take to the hustings, for the first time, education was brought into the political discourse.

This was significant and deserves attention in the cacophony of ugly, coarse political rhetoric that is now the norm in our electoral discourse.