With Delhi facing elections next year, perhaps it is time to examine once again whether what the Aam Aadmi Party stands for can be an alternative to the BJP. Politically, the AAP seeks to avoid engaging in the left-right debate of mainstream politics. The party prefers to remain silent on polarizing religious, political, social and economic issues. The AAP is neither left-wing, nor liberal, nor right-wing.

The AAP claims to be an alternative because it does not rely on traditional politicians. It alone promises committed, transparent and effective governance.

The BJP may have succeeded in getting voters to rethink Kejriwal’s claims of honesty and anti-corruption past. The political battles have put the AAP on the back burner and prompted its leaders to devote less time and energy to their governance agenda. Serious voters will evaluate whether the AAP has actually delivered on its governance promises during its ten years in power before deciding whether to maintain the AAP or reject it.

Among the questions they will evaluate will be whether Delhi’s education revolution was just sound and fury? Or has something actually been achieved?

Yamini Aiyar, a visiting senior fellow at Brown University in the US and former CEO of the Center for Policy Research, says that while learning outcomes must have improved thanks to the AAP government’s initiatives, what is more important is the shift in balance at the level of teachers and school administrators towards improving learning outcomes, including for backbenchers, beyond just exam grades and success in final exams.

Ms. Aiyar’s recent book, Lessons on State Capacity in Delhi Schools, chronicles a research project she and her fellow researchers undertook on a key education reform initiative of the Delhi government. AAP. “We have not actively measured the degrees of progress of the project but, with the amount of contributions received, government data shows some improvements in basic literacy and numeracy, particularly after the reading week missions and the Buniyaad mission. We find evidence of a shifting balance in how teachers tackle learning challenges in the classroom and how students approach teaching and learning. It has been slow and steady and its effects have been more visible in the aftermath of COVID,” she adds.

For three and a half years (from 2016 to early 2019), Ms Aiyar and her fellow researchers embedded themselves in eight schools in Delhi and used various methods such as classroom observations and group discussions to record the changes that were occurring . In early 2023, a few months after schools reopened following COVID-19-induced closures, they conducted a final perception survey among teachers before completing their field research. Ms. Aiyar calls the AAP’s education reform effort unique because it was a concerted part of their policy discourse.

A unique effort

Across India, school enrollment rates often reach 100%, although dropout rates can be high. The basic infrastructure required at primary school level is in place. Programs such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan have achieved this. Yet only half of students entering Class 6 have basic literacy and numeracy skills – measured as being able to achieve Class 2 learning outcomes. And the newly elected AAP government has sought to work on this point in Delhi. “It was a real long-term project,” says Ms. Aiyar.

Other state governments have intervened in education by increasing funding, taking welfare measures or reserving higher education institutions for deprived sections, etc. Few have sought to truly address the problem of poor learning outcomes.

By the time students reach Class 6, the curriculum has already progressed. And teachers focus on passing percentages. “Most students who were unable to catch up earlier continue to stay put. They just move around, from class to class, with teachers having very little incentive to focus on them,” she says.

The PAA’s “educational revolution” included the following elements: improving school infrastructure; improve the quality of learning through disruptive educational interventions; reshape the assessment structure to align it with students’ mastery of concepts rather than rote learning; and improve accountability through increased parental involvement in school activities. “There have been constant efforts from the top down,” says Aiyar.

What the AAP government sought to do was to break the classroom consensus of mastering exams and maximizing pass percentages. “Chunauti sought to change classroom consensus by freeing it from the tyranny of curriculum completion through the idea of ​​“differential teaching” in which teachers teach according to the level of each student. Teachers needed to be freed from the objectives of curricula and textbooks,” adds Ms. Aiyar.

Towards the end of the research study, teachers were still talking about students in terms of exam preparation and the class in terms of curriculum requirements. But now the distance between students’ learning levels and their gaps in test preparation has become a topic of conversation among teachers, setting the stage for a dialogue about what it means for students to achieve mastery of a subject and how to “teach” in this reality, she said. ” he said, adding, “The ship was sinking and the Delhi government managed to stay the course. In other words, a start has indeed been made towards solving the fundamental problems of school education.

Lessons for broad governance reform

What the AAP government sought to address was the general problem of corrupt and poorly performing frontline bureaucrats across India. In education, these are school administrators and teachers.

Ms Aiyar denounces the current trend of bypassing these bureaucrats, notably through technology and monetary transfers. She says: “What we have learned is that long-term change requires deep, consistent, long-term engagement with front-line actors, focused on empowering and empowering them,” she says.

Reforms should reaffirm the purpose of the work of frontline bureaucrats through the “mystique of mission” and motivate them through change agents within the system. Short-term interventions should expose front-line bureaucrats to opportunities to work differently, which would change their hierarchical dynamics from being “told” what to do and treated like employees to being treated like authorized agents. “This means more discretion and delegation at the grassroots level of administration, greater accountability of local governments and a reorganization of the training and management system within a bureaucracy that encourages more Y-type management, it is “that is, management that monitors results and compliance with the rules,” she said. said.