BANGALORE/GULBARGA: How many educational institutions came up with the abysmal record of securing zero percentage results in the SSLC and PU boards? The list features 30 private schools, 44 unaided PU colleges and not a single government school. No wonder, G Kumar Naik, former principal secretary for primary and secondary education, was beaming at the press conference to announce the SSLC and PU results on May 6.That government schools are the black sheep in the system has turned out to be a myth. It's the unaided schools that are not being accountable to their stakeholders and have done the damage in the past two years. The Times of India tries to find out why these schools have failed to get even one student clear the crucial class 10 and 12 examinations.The Gulbarga story will tell you how. There are six schools and two PU colleges from the district that have featured in the black list. Many of these were opened this year. But the admissions have been few and far between, and the handful of students they have are never regular to school. Thanks to poor attendance, private managements shy away from appointing lecturers. Thus, most of the institutions in the district suffer from faculty shortage. With no teachers, the students miserably fail in the exams. It is a vicious circle.SM Salunke, deputy director of Pre-University Education, told TOI: "Performance of Hyderabad-Karnataka regions is becoming worse every year. The management of private institutions should appoint good lecturers and must be strict about attendance in these schools. But this is not happening. If a college gets zero percent for three years it will be blacklisted. Before any aid is provided to them, we look at their performance for five years and decide," he added.K S Krishna Iyer, general secretary, Karnataka State Private School Management Federation adds on to the list of reasons. "There are some schools which are 8-10 years old. They are Kannada medium schools opened by managements expecting aid from the department. For the teachers in such schools, continuance in service is their only concern and not whether students pass or not."Lack of faculty continues to be the cause of concern across schools. "We had done a study on schools that could not get 40% results last year. And everywhere we realized that all such schools had a perennial problem with faculty. The managements did not encourage them, salary was a problem and they never continued for long. There was misadministration," said Venkatesh B P, DDPI, Bangalore North. Bangalore North this year has three schools in the list."Many of these schools would be new, with their first batch appearing. They will have initial hiccups with infrastructure and faculty. The managements would have had money initially to start off, and then would face financial problems. This is a common issue," said H N Raju, nodal officer (exams).V P Niranjan Aradhya, a professor at National Law School of India University (NLSIU) who is a staunch supporter of public education, explains why government schools are at an advantage: "Some of these private schools would not have received recognition to run high schools. They will tag their children along with some other schools when it's exam time. The performance of teachers in a school is directly proportional to the monetary benefit that she gets. There are schools that provide a salary as low as Rs 1,000- Rs 1,500. The poor learning environment in these schools do not come as a surprise. Moreover, these managements would have no inclination to provide education as a service. They would have started it to earn money."Government schools do well because of various reasons, he adds. "The infrastructure in secondary government schools is good. They are economically better off than most of the private ones. And, all of them have specialized trained teachers which many unaided schools lack."It was an awful report card yet again for the Hearing Impact PU College in Udaya Nagar. One of its kinds, the college had eight students, who appeared for the PU examination this year."We have eight students and four teachers to look after them. All the students are hearing impaired and thus lessons are imparted in the sign language. Teaching subjects like commerce through sign language is not an easy job," says M Janitha, a teacher at the college.Slow learning capacity, language barrier and minimal retention power of the students were some other reasons cited by the college officials for the poor result. "All our students come from poor background and know only Kannada. Moreover, they are forgetful and hardly retain lessons taught the previous day," said CN Vijay Raj, founder secretary of the collegeAlthough it recorded zero percent result on paper, Vijay Raj says it's an improved report this year. "This is the third batch of students who appeared for the PU examination. When we started in 2010, we had only four students who wrote their exam in 2011. . The first batch wrote the examination in 2011 and all of them scored zero in all subjects. We pulled up our socks and started preparing them for the next year's examination. Four more students joined us last year. All of them failed and scored between four and 10 marks," says Vijay Raj."Students have failed only in one or two subjects. They are preparing hard to clear the supplementary examination beginning from June 3," he says.All 15 students of VJR PU College in Chellikere in Kalyannagar failed in the PU exam this year. This was its first batch. But a stroll inside the institution will not give you reasons for the poor performance. For, the infrastructure is in place and one gets to see even a school bus on the small playground before it.The secretary of the institution, Venkat Ram Reddy, is disappointed but hopes to produce better results next time."We have given everything we could to students in terms of infrastructure and faculty. But the students could not perform. Most of them are from underprivileged background. Most of them go to work and are irregular to class. They have to earn for the family and their priority is that," he said."Since we are a new school, the students we get are also filtered after the admission in other schools. This is our first batch and we could have fumbled in many places. We will try to work it out next year," he added.