Thoughts on the Affordable Private Schools (APS) Ecosystem
If you know me you know that I am not a big fan of the APS ecosystem. While at the outset the framework of intention looks pretty solid and makes a great business case, in the backdrop of low learning outcomes in public schools and a seemingly willing buying class who aspire to break the cycle of oppression and poverty, the APS ecosystem struggles to follow that up with outcomes that are strong and enduring. It rather perpetuates dangers that have a deeper impact on society.
Perpetuating a cycle of poor educators
As the APS ecosystem has grown and has received the support of several philanthropists and think tanks, a new breed of organisations has emerged that excel in providing high-quality curriculum, educator training and tech systems to these schools. Their USP is a degree of standardisation in their products that enables anyone, absolutely anyone to teach children and help them master academic content. Their products and services are analogous to Maggi — everyone can make it and you don’t particularly need any specific skill except for the skill of following instructions. This has further enabled APS to hire educators with little to no experience and pedagogical understanding to walk into classrooms — at a cost that is often lower than minimum wages prescribed by the state — which does 2 things, (1) pushes children not to aspire to be teachers as it does not seem like a viable option and (2) does not attract high-quality talent to teaching. So a system that was once designed to help people out of the cycles of oppression and poverty actually thrives on people staying in that cycle.
Imagine the same happening with doctors, you would flip out — but when it happens in our schools we are pretty okay with it. So one of the reasons why the education ecosystem is not thriving in India is because of these mushrooming Affordable Private Schools that thrive on aspirations of the low-income communities but do nothing to support the aspiration.
Taking away social capital from schooling
Public schools have in the past 2 decades struggled with nurturing an equal social capital on both sides of the table — the educators and the parents. As the middle class (and its upper and lower cousins) have continued to pull itself out from public schools and moved to private schools and APS — the #junta that held the public schools accountable to outcomes have dwindled. Inherent class politics and biases have made it harder for parents to hold educators accountable and easy for educators to ignore parents. And the fast-moving, ruthless economy has left parents from low-income communities with little time for their children as they do everything to ensure there is food on the table, often working long hours. So the public schools are left with a skewed power dynamic that serves no one. The APS attract that segment of the economy that has just enough social capital to hold the public schools accountable but not enough to hold private schools accountable — they actually bank the social capital to access APS. Hence you have a system that completely sucks out internal accountability from the education system leaving it at the whims and fancies of promoters and politicians. Once again making the system work perfectly to keep the ones in the cycle of poverty tightly inside the cycle.
if we truly believe that education is the tool to end cycles of inter-generational poverty and oppression, then we need to ensure that our parents have social capital that enables them to hold the school accountable — while the School Management Comms are a solid step in that direction we also need more socio-economic diversity inside our public schools. The APS ecosystem actually builds uniform socio-economic silos that lockout diversity and makes it difficult to break out of social stigmas and narratives — hence maintaining the status quo which only serves the rich.
