In the staff room of a government secondary school in a district town, over two years of visits, I worked out where the children of the eleven teachers went to school. Nine were in private schools in the same town. One teacher had no children. One had a son in the school she taught in, in class nine, and she mentioned it in a way that made it clear she expected me to think something about it.
I am not going to name the school and I am not going to make an accusation, because I do not think there is one to make. That is most of my argument.
The observation is not new. Anyone who has spent time in Indian government schools has made it, and it circulates as a piece of common knowledge that everybody repeats and nobody has ever collected. That is the thing I want to write about: not the fact, but its uncollectability.
Consider what it would measure. A teacher's choice of school for their own child is the judgment of a person with more information about that institution than any inspector, any survey, or any parent. They know the actual teaching hours as opposed to the timetabled ones. They know which colleagues turn up. They know what the class nine results mean, because they know how the practical marks are awarded. If you wanted a single indicator of whether a school works, you could not design a better one, and it costs nothing to collect because the information exists in eleven people's heads in every staff room in the country.
It is not collected. It will not be collected. And the reason is that the instant you collect it, it stops being an indicator and becomes an accusation against eleven named individuals.
That reason is a good one and I want to give it its full weight rather than treating it as squeamishness.
A teacher choosing a private school for her daughter is doing what every parent in this country with any means does, for the reasons every parent does it — the English medium, the perceived discipline, the fact that her colleagues' children go there and a nine-year-old's friendships are not nothing. She did not create the school she works in. She has, in most cases, no power over its staffing, its funding, its calendar, or the forty-one days she loses to non-teaching duty. Holding her personally responsible for the institution's condition, on the evidence of her daughter's uniform, is both unfair and useless: it would change her decision about her daughter and nothing else.
And an indicator that produces unfairness produces evasion. Publish it per school and the answer would be transfers, resignations from the schools that would look worst, and — within about two years — a set of arrangements in which the numbers no longer mean anything. This is what happens to every education indicator in this country that acquires consequences, and it is why I have spent six years asking for measurements that are descriptive rather than punitive.
So I am not asking for it to be collected. Let me say what I think it means that it cannot be.
We have an indicator that is free, that is more informative than anything currently gathered, and that is unusable for the sole reason that the people best placed to judge these schools are also the people employed by them. That is not a measurement problem. It is a description of the position teachers have been put in: asked to staff an institution, given no power over it, and rendered unable to say what they think of it except through a decision about their own children that everyone can see and nobody may mention.
The teacher whose son was in class nine told me, later and without my asking, that her husband had wanted him in the convent and that she had refused. She said it was because of the fees. Then she said something else, which was that she taught him mathematics herself in the evenings, which is what the parents paying the convent fees are also doing, and that she supposed it came to the same thing.
It does not come to the same thing, and she knew it did not, and I did not say so.