For BMC school students, it’s still a testing time
MUMBAI: While the lobby of parents whose children study in private schools managed to stall the state’s controversial system of introducing eight extra tests a year, the system has been in place in civic schools for the last six months.
“The city’s elite woke up with a start when they found that their kids were going to be subjected to extra tests. Where were they when poor children in civic schools were being subjected to these tests?” asked Ramesh Joshi, president, Brihanmumbai Mahapalika Shikshak Sabha, the largest BMC teachers’ union, at a press conference on Friday.
Joshi has been fighting a lone battle in the HC against the tests. He added that over 40,000 students from civic schools did not sit for the exams in March after the introduction of extra tests.
“The biggest concern for BMC schools is to retain children and prevent them from dropping out.” While it took barely a week of protests and media attention to bring the tests to a standstill in private SSC schools, the tests will continue in BMC schools.
CM Vilasrao Deshmukh on Wednesday stayed the tests in private schools but made no mention of civic schools. Arundati Chavan, president of the PTA United Forum, which was instrumental in stalling the tests, said that since parents of children in civic schools were uneducated and ignorant about the system, they could not protest.
“There is no parents’ association in BMC schools,” said Chavan who has signatures from over a lakh parents calling for a complete boycott of the tests.
“In a private school, parents are more involved in the academic prog-ress of their children,” said Fr Gregory Lobo, secretary, Archdiocesan Board of Education, which runs 150 schools in Mumbai, Thane and Rai-gad. He has been receiving petitions from PTAs from all ABE schools.
Education minister Vasant Purke had earlier said that, except for Mumbai, no other region in the state had witnessed such protests against the tests. “That’s probably because rural Maharashtra is largely poverty-stricken.
Does the minister expect farmers, who are dying of hunger, to fight against tests being conducted in their children’s schools?” asked Joshi.
Several educationists, however, pointed out that teaching standards were different in private and civic schools and the two should not be judged on the same level.
In their defence, BMC teachers said they were provided with neither the infrastructure nor the time to teach. “It’s not that we can’t teach.
We just don’t get the time to teach,” said Sushma Manjrekar, a teacher at Nare Park Primary School, Parel. “We are stuck doing huge amounts of clerical work,” added Manali Vartak, from Kajupada Municipal School, Borivali.
Joshi added that there was a clear conspiracy on the part of the government to privatise education by shutting down civic and zilla parishad schools and driving away children by imposing a volley of tests on them.
URL- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1822990.cms