শিক্ষাবিদ
At the recommendation of Consultation Committee for Primary and Non-formal Education Development, the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education passed an order to DPE to increase the salary grade of the government primary school teachers. That, however, has not satisfied the teachers who gave an ultimatum to the government instead to press their three points demand by 04 May. We know around three lac seventy-five thousand teachers work in government primary schools with the status of 13th grade and the head teachers’ 11th grade. According to the new proposal the assistant teachers’ grade will be 12th and the head teachers’ 10th. The Consultation Committee also suggested to repeal the position of entry level ‘assistant teacher’ by renaming it as teacher.
The Association of Primary Assistant Teacher Unity has placed three demands that include the beginning of assistant teachers’ position should be in the 11th grade, removing the prevailing complexities of getting higher scale after ten and sixteen years and promotion to the position of head teacher fully, regularly and quickly. If these demands are not fulfilled by 4 May, they will go for partial work abstention from 5 May to 25 May which may follow greater movement. They also demanded to upgrade the position of all head teachers up to 10th grade revoking the decision only for writ petitioners. The advisor to the Primary and Mass Education says that the recommendations of the Consultation Committee should be reviewed and will be implemented only when the teachers agree.The country sees more than one lac primary schools including 65thousand 566 government primary schools. The non-government primary schools which also play a vital role in terms of disseminating primary education to millions of children. However, they need to have government registration and follow the regulations imposed by the government. The government regulation doesn’t reflect in most of the cases that has raised the concern of the ministry. Of course, having government registration sounds very good and easy but in the name of government registration, bribery, irregularities and serious bossing prevail in this area that tend to mar the objectives of disseminating primary education to the children. The irregularities, the behaviour of the field officers, their dedication, honesty and real patriotism must come as important points along with empowering them with the power to give registration to the non-government schools and supervise them. When the field officials will have these qualities, getting registration from them may work well and the non-government primary schools will smilingly have registration and follow all sorts of regulations, otherwise things not be rosy as it is thought.
The Secretary to the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education has underscored the need of turning the Compulsory Primary Education Implementation Monitoring Unit into a full directorate and with this end in view, he convened a meeting where it was unanimously accepted that kindergartens, non-government primary schools and primary schools attached to high schools must be brought under registration process and compel them to follow the rules and regulations imposed by the government. In the first order, we must appreciate this move and thought. However, it is also true that the more we separate the directorate or division, the less the coordination happens among the related departments as they want to work independently without sharing the ideas with the relevant departments and people. A strong coordination is absolutely necessary to make things happen and take any important decisions that many of our departments lack. If there lies no or less coordination among different divisions of education, establishing separate directorate will further widen the communication gap. It also may mean that developing a separate directorate will be just to accommodate the bureaucrats facilitating their promotion and expanding their area of work without making any positive change in the real field, I mean ensuring quality education for the rural and backward children who usually go to government primary schools. Quality education has been a big issue for long in our entire educational arena that begins with our primary education which sees the weakest base of the students and that continues till higher education.The proposed directorate will shoulder 17 responsibilities and out of them, the significant one will be to monitor, evaluate, conduct research and put recommendations accordingly. In order to do that, arranging training and workshops in district and national level will be their usual works. Moreover, it will monitor the registration activities of non-government primary and kindergartens. At the same time, registered non-government primary schools, learning centers run by BNFE, NGOs run centers, visiting and supervising the community schools. Above all, this directorate will publish and circulate the information and speech related to primary education.
There lies no regular system of assessing or monitoring the academic progress of the learners. It happens occasionally. One such assessment was conducted several months back that shows a very dismal picture. Students’ competency has been ascertained on the basis of their ability to read, write and understand which has been identified by green, yellow and red colour. In the city of Dhaka 21 schools of Matijheel, Ramna, Dhanmondi thana were visited but not a single one was found in green colour zone, 6 found yellow 6 and the rest are red. It is a wakeup call for the entire primary education administration. When this is the situation of Dhaka city government primary schools, we can easily deduce the facts of the rural and remote area schools. Again, after visiting 483 primary schools of 20 upazilas of 12 districts, only six schools have been identified as green category, yellow 161 and the rest 316 .
Students’ learning quality or achieving competency has been seen mostly red that covers from 00 to 60 percent, from 61 to 79 percent yellow and 81-100 green. Can we bring here real change by establishing a separate directorate to give registration and monitor the kindergartens or non-government primary schools? Do we find any correlation between establishing quality of education and turning monitoring unit of the ministry into a full directorate?Writer: Former Teacher of Cadet College