Unequal Classrooms

India’s school system has long prided itself on scale. But scale, as the latest Class 10 results of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) suggest, is increasingly accompanied by stratification. Over 93.7 percent of students cleared the exams; more than 55,000 scored above 95 percent. Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan and Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti posted near-perfect pass rates. Private schools, too, performed robustly. At the bottom sat government-aided schools, with a pass percentage of 91.01 percent. While the gap may appear modest, it reflects a deeper structural divergence that India has struggled, and often failed, to address.

The post-Independence consensus, shaped by the Kothari Commission, had envisioned a common school system - a moral commitment to equal educational opportunity regardless of socio-economic background. That ambition, however, was diluted almost as soon as it was articulated. Education expanded rapidly, but unevenly, with states relying on a patchwork of government, aided and private institutions.

Government-aided schools emerged as a compromise: privately managed but publicly funded. In theory, they would combine community initiative with state support. In practice, they became administratively ambiguous. Unlike fully government schools, they often escaped direct bureaucratic oversight; unlike private schools, they lacked the incentives and autonomy to innovate. Teacher recruitment, salary structures and accountability mechanisms fell into a grey zone.

The numbers today bear the imprint of that history. While Kendriya and Navodaya schools which are centrally administered, well-funded and tightly regulated, perform best. Their success is not accidental but institutional. They benefit from standardised teacher recruitment, relatively better infrastructure and a culture of performance monitoring. Private schools, though uneven in quality, operate under competitive pressure.

Government-aided schools, by contrast, are trapped between control and neglect. Their teachers are frequently paid by the state but managed by private bodies, diluting accountability.

Recent reforms have sought to bridge this divide. The National Education Policy 2020, for instance, emphasises flexibility, continuous assessment and reduced high-stakes testing. CBSE’s introduction of two board examinations reflects this shift, as does its decision to forgo merit lists in favour of a less competitive ethos. These are sensible steps. But they operate largely at the level of pedagogy and assessment. The structural fault lines lie elsewhere.

In aided schools, managements have limited authority to reward or discipline teachers, while governments hesitate to enforce accountability for fear of political backlash. Students, often from less privileged backgrounds, lack the supplementary support that their counterparts in private schools enjoy. The system thus compounds disadvantage while appearing formally egalitarian.

Without clearer lines of accountability, better alignment of incentives and sustained investment in teacher quality, aided schools will continue to lag.

The CBSE’s impressive aggregate results should not obscure this reality. They are, in a sense, the average of two systems moving at different speeds. Bridging that divide will require more than curricular reform. It will demand a return to first principles and a willingness to confront the institutional compromises that have long defined Indian schooling.