Education decline in rural Pakistan

Are our children learning? That’s the question ASER Pakistan has been trying to answer year after year. The latest in that quest is its Annual Status of Education Report 2014 released late week. It is difficult to summarise the many frightening findings from that report in this little space, but some of the key ones pertaining to rural Pakistan are highlighted below.
One of the obvious findings of the report is the shifting school preference in rural Pakistan. More rural children (30%) are now being sent to private or other non-government schools than was the case in 2013 (26%). The likely cause behind this also seems obvious: ASER’s 2014 survey findings reveal that the learning outcome of class-5 children is poorer in rural government schools than in rural private schools.
According to the report, only 37 percent of the government school children under survey could do ‘at least division in arithmetic’, as against 54 percent from among the private school lot. Likewise, only 42 percent of government school children can read at least a story in Urdu/Sindhi/Pashto compared to 60 percent of those in the private sector. Similarly, only 37 percent of government school children could read at least a sentence in English as against 60 percent in private schools.
For a state constitutionally tasked to provide “free and compulsory education to all children of age 5-16 years,” it is doing a very bad job. If it cannot provide good education itself, the least it could do is to explore schooling the options of education vouchers schemes or some other form public private partnership to ensure that every child goes to school. Yet, there have no serious attempts on this front, outside Punjab.
The second finding worth bringing to light is the falling quality of education in rural Pakistan. A comparison of ASER’s latest report with that published last year shows that learning levels are eroding year after year. When a sample of children enrolled in class 5 were tested for their ability to read a class-2 level story, only 46 percent could do so. That’s down from 50 percent in the preceding two surveys.
Likewise, when class 5 students were tested for their ability to read class 2 level sentence in English language, only 40 percent could do so, down from 43 percent in 2013 and 48 percent in 2012. Similar is the situation in the case of 2-digit class-3 level arithmetic division. 2014’s findings reveal that only 40 percent could do, as against 40 percent in 2013 and 44 percent in the year before.
If this trend will not make provincial education ministers wake up from their slumber then what will. Perhaps, God forbid, a terrorist attack on schools, because 39 percent of government schools in rural Pakistan (27% in case of private schools) do not even have a boundary wall – let alone other necessary facilities. Are there any champions in provincial education departments, anyone?