High School Woes: No reform from Dispur’s end, schools going to score a duck again

GUWAHATI: The scene in majority of schools scoring zero pass percentage in High School Leaving Certificate (HSLC) examinations results over the last few years in Assam is not changing for better and these institutions are going to score a duck in the next year too solely due to lack of effective reform initiatives from Dispur’s end.

In 2017 when cabinet minister Himanta Biswa Sarma was holding the education portfolio in 2017, he asked his department to amalgamate a few government schools with zero pass percentage and transfer their teachers as a disciplinary measure. Sarma had publicly reprimanded the principals of these schools and asked them either to perform or perish.

“Things, however, have not changed for better and the number of government school scoring zero pass percentage remained the same in 2018 as the last year,” a source in State Education department told The Sentinel.

Even though the Education department is yet to identify the causes of disastrous results by such schools, many schools which have recorded a consistent zero pass percentage have cited poverty as the prime cause for their poor show, putting Dispur, in a fix on whether to keep or shun these institutions.

Sources said some such schools situated along the Assam-Bangladesh border explained that their students come from extremely impoverished backgrounds and are hence not bothered about studies.

“These parents are daily wage earners and frequently cross the porous Assam-Bangladesh border to work. So they ask their children to stay at home and look after family affairs instead of sending them to school. They are totally illiterate and cannot look after their children’s education even at home. These students go to school just for the sake of it and are not interested in passing the HSLC examinations,” the source said.

Besides poverty, many schools have also cited floods and underdevelopment in areas dominated by ethnic communities as the causes of the abysmal results.