Loopholes in the rationalisation policy of teachers

The teacher rationalisation policy harms education by misplacing teachers and neglecting classroom quality.

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Asymmetrical and disproportionate availability of teachers to students misdirects all efforts and policies to buttress our crumbling education system. As a stop-gap measure, rationalisation of teachers in government schools as per students-teacher ratio (STR) is employed to end professional injustice and educational loss incurred by educators and students respectively. At first blush, all seems good with the policy.

As per STR, one teacher per forty students is mandatory at a school. Among the surplus teachers, the one with the longest stay at the school will be rationalised first and transferred to where the deficiency of teachers derails the learning process. This postulate doesn't consider the contribution and inevitability of the teacher for quality results and learning at the school. The junior teachers knowingly misperform or underperform because they know that the axe of rationalisation is not meant for them.

In the absence of a regular incumbent principal/ headmaster at a secondary school, the teacher who is senior most by service at the secondary level is appointed as the incharge principal of the school. In one case, his departmental promotion was at hand. He, in order to satisfy his workplace friction with teachers awaiting rationalisation, defyingly devised such policies that didn't let the total number of students rise, rather facilitated the dropout of students.

Why is the teacher most senior by length of service not placed atop for rationalisation? Why is the teacher with the longest stay at the school rationalised instead? This is a blatant contradiction in terms.

The teachers being rationalised are mostly relocated to distant places, which affects their performance seriously. This results in demoralisation and decreased job satisfaction among teachers. Female teachers, especially in conservative areas, face extra challenges. Many families won't allow women to work in outlying places, restricting how much this policy can achieve. The job of teaching must be treated differently as its aim is to produce creative and dynamic human resource, and a work friendly milieu is a sine qua non for maximising the output.

The axe of rationalisation mostly falls on the result-generating teachers particularly in cities. The best criteria for rationalising teachers must consider their results in terminal exams. It will urge junior-in-stay teachers to shake off their inertia and become a part of the synergy of juniors and seniors.

In the recent rationalisation of teachers in Punjab, the surplus teacher as per replacement policy is transferred say ten to twenty kilometres away from his present school to a seat vacated by the teacher who himself applies for transfer to a nearby school just one kilometre far. This anomaly arises in e-transfer, which only aims at filling the vacant seats irrespective of the distance to be covered by the teacher or his performance.

Another loophole causing the malfunctioning of the rationalisation policy is that the two teachers with longest stay at their respective schools apply opportunistically for the mutual transfer whereby they become junior at their targetted schools, and thus evade being rationalised to distant stations through the forced transfer.

Strangely enough, the incumbent head of a school is not apportioned any blame while analysing how teachers become surplus at a school. His laid-back approach towards enrollment campaigns and pedagogy contribute immensely to the low enrollment of students, and still, he gets scot-free while teachers are 'more sinned against than sinning'.

Our STR must be lowered from forty to UNESCO's average of 30. So, instead of lowering STR to improve the efficiency of teachers and efficacy of learning, we surplussed the teachers maintaining the proverbial crowded classrooms at public institutions. Similarly, instead of taking stock of its failure in bringing out-of-school children into schools where teachers are surplus, the state deported the teachers.

Instead of stamping out the factors that cause the underperformance or misperformance of teachers, the state has tinkered with the learning process of students beyond repair by indiscriminate reshuffling and relocating teachers.