The Aam Admi Party (AAP) has some radical plans when it comes to role of the community in running neighbourhood government schools.

New Delhi: The Aam Admi Party (AAP) has some radical plans when it comes to role of the community in running neighbourhood government schools. Committed to making “government systems accountable to people”, AAP envisages creating ‘abhibhaavak sabhas’ - comprising parents of students - to whom the school will be directly accountable.

The proposal is an extension of the parent-teacher-community committees or school management committees (SMCs) mandated under the Right to Education (RTE) Act that endeavours to make schools more accountable to the community. Incidentally, one of the most blatant violations of the RTE Act in Delhi is a near-total absence of SMCs even three years after the Act was passed.

“We’ve said that schools should be directly accountable to the local mohalla sabhas and, a subset of that, which we are calling abhibhaavak sabhas, which is an assembly of all parents because they are the stakeholders. Today if a parent from the Jahangirpuri resettlement colony goes to the neighbourhood government school to ask why her child is not being taught properly, she is not taken seriously. We want to make schools accountable to the local community, which is missing today," says AAP member Atishi Marlena, who has a one-year research degree in Education from Oxford University.

Asked how the abhibhaavak sabhas would operate, Marlena says, it would involve calling “open assemblies” where key decisions on running and managing the school would be taken.

“Our experience has shown that one of the best ways of avoiding corruption is to have decisions made in open assemblies, be it in gram sabhas in villages, mohalla sabhas in cities, abhibhaavak sabhas in schools. If you have an abhibhavak sabha - an open assembly of all parents - you are already ensuring a system which is far more transparent,” says the AAP member, who blames corruption and lack of accountability for the poor quality of public education in India.

Quality public education is a cornerstone of AAP’s philosophy, says Marlena. “AAP is fundamentally committed to improving the public education system. We will make government schools as good if not better than private schools.”

But what about the RTE Act, which the Congress party is touting as one of its major achievements? While it is a step in the right direction, it is a ‘small, inadequate’ one, says Yogendra Yadav, member of AAP’s national executive.

Noting that even the minimum requirements of RTE have not been met in Delhi Yadav says, “In our country we have confused right to schooling with right to education… Most of governments have started believing that their job is done because most of the children have started going to school. The real challenge is not getting the child to school, but getting them quality education.”

AAP members say RTE has remained a law on paper. “Many of the things we are fighting for are provisions of a law that the government has already passed,” says Marlena.

Another key aspect of AAP’s agenda on education is regulation of private schools. The manifesto proposes a new law to control ‘profiteering’ by private schools that would “regulate fees and clamp down on donations demands by private education institutions.”

“Today the common man has no choice but to send his child to a private school because the government schools are dysfunctional. Even someone who has small income is willing to spend a large amount of it on education because they feel this is their one and only chance in life. Our strategy to fight commercialisation in schools is two-pronged. One, to regulate the existing private schools and two, to improve quality of education in government schools,” says the AAP member.

Also on AAP’s education agenda are opening more government schools, introducing ‘child-friendly pedagogy instead of rote learning’, filling vacancies for teachers, ensuring better salaries for teachers in private schools and doing away with the practice of hiring teachers on a contract basis.