Educación Primaria 78

During the individual interview and focus group discussions, all the participants reported problems with the government’s school funding policy, teacher recruitment system, provision for forming SMCs, and the lack of an efficient teacher appraisal system. More specifically, all of the principals from higher performing schools stated in their interviews that the government did not provide a sufficient number of teachers. Although the higher performing schools had more government funded teachers than the lower performing schools, participants from higher performing schools expressed their frustrations against the government policy during the discussion session, particularly with regard to how they were forced to recruit extra teachers and staff from their own internal resources. On the other hand, as a result of failures to properly allocate permanent teachers according to the number of students at each school, some principals from lower performing schools actually said they had more teachers than needed for their low student enrolments. A few even considered this to be a problem as stated by Rama Adhikari (B5): “We have more than enough teachers here at this school. This is one reason why teachers engage more on other activities than in teaching.”

During the focus group discussions some principals also suggested that not enough competent and smart people were joining the teaching profession because of government underfunding and a lack of employment benefits. The situation has been exacerbated by government policy restricting the number of permanent teaching positions, forcing

schools to rely more heavily on temporary teachers, as discussed in Chapter Three. Laxmi Manandhar (B1) stated in her interview that the government had failed to offer permanent positions for several thousands of teachers who had continued to work as temporary teachers for more than twenty years. This was one of the reasons prompting Dhan Yadav (B4), the only male participant from lower performing schools, to complain that most new teachers enter the profession as a “platform job” until they find something better and leave the profession.

Furthermore, following the decentralization of management in education after 1990, the government has focused on handing over the management of public schools to the community in order to maximize community involvement in the education process. According to the government regulation, only parents or legal guardians of existing students are eligible to serve on a School Management Committee. Many participants identified this as a problem when seeking to recruit educated, interested and motivated community members to their SMCs. In the focus group discussions too, participants shared that most of the students attending public schools in cities such as Kathmandu are migrants from poor families whose elder members are mostly illiterate, making the formation of efficient and effective SMCs even more difficult. In consequence, public schools in Katmandu (and other cities) are often isolated and detached from their own communities. The situation is exacerbated by higher SES families choosing to send their children to private schools, making their parents indifferent to public schools in their neighborhood, in which they had no meaningful involvement. This problem was clearly identified by many of the participants, especially those from lower performing schools, as illustrated by the following response by Rita Dhungel (B2):

These days the government has adopted a policy to handover the management of the school to the community. However, since there are no students from local population, creating school management committee has been the problem. At times, we have to have fake chairperson and committee members because of that.

Moreover, a majority of the principals identified corruption as a serious problem in the public education sector including lack of positive attitude and support from government officials to public schools, most appearing indifferent as stated by Uddav Shrestha (A1) who was going to retire in a month after serving for the longest period as a principal at his school:

The government officials, school inspectors including DEO, have been involved in corruption which has contributed [to the] deterioration of quality in public schools… The government officials are least bothered about the school. Their work is limited in preparing reports and completing paper works. We have difficult situation since we do not have any concrete support and positive attitude towards the public schools among government officials.

Statements in the interview transcripts specifically mentioned “favoritism and nepotism” in the selection of teachers and school leaders. As stated by Laxmi Manandhar (B1), for example, “Bribery and corruption determines who gets selected and who does not, rather than capacity of the teachers.” Many participants were concerned that this has

discouraged many teachers and principals. Moreover, most principals complained that government planning was overly top-down with insufficient regard to the voices of teachers and principals. There appeared to be general agreement in the focus group

discussions that the government should consult teachers and principals regularly when formulating educational policies and developing plans affecting schools. Moreover, participants, mainly from higher performing schools, also complained about a lack of proper incentives and recognition from the government, expressing dissatisfaction regarding the lack of encouragement and rewards to the principals and teachers who contributed significantly to student success.

Interestingly, one of the more experienced and popular principals from among the higher performing schools who had 18 years of leadership role, Dharma Sharma (A2), observed that a principal should defy government rules that impeded good school leadership and instruction. Mr. Sharma was very open during the interview session and he expressed his views and dissatisfaction very strongly:

…there are several government policies that go against the interest of the public schools. Therefore, I assume that when the intention is good, you could still navigate through the regulations. For me, when you do not have good intention, following the rules and regulations alone does not bring positive result.

This appeared to be a widely shared view since all the principals from higher performing schools had adopted their own internal school policies to attract parents and help students do better ignoring some of the government policies. For example, among others, all the principals from higher performing schools reported collecting tuition fees from their students to address their resource needs which was directly against the government policy. The following response from Shiva Ratna Shakya (A3) illustrates the point:

The government does not have a policy for collecting tuition fee from students since it’s free. However, we collect it as support to the school. Even government officials suggest [to] us how to collect fee from students in such a way that this can’t be claimed as tuition fee by law but rather [as] support extended to school. These views were independently supported by other principals from higher performing schools who talked about how they had adopted their own internal school policies to attract parents and help students do better, which ignored various government policies. A majority of the participants suggested that the government should review education policy to improve the distribution of resources, teacher motivation, hiring and firing of teachers, and overall supervision and monitoring.