The Importance Of Teacher Truancy In India

841 Words2 Pages

Truancy appears to be a wide epidemic spurring across all of India, but instead of the students purposely missing school, it’s the teachers. As stated in the article and nationwide studies led by Mr. Muralidharan, a stunning 24 to 46 percent of rural Indian teachers were absent during random spot checks by education officers. Mr. Mishra, the individual behind fighting one of India’s biggest educational obstacles in the world, pursues to not only end the trend of teacher truancy, but also aims to understand why teachers choose not to step a foot in their classrooms in the first place. While the reasons are many and some valid, the fundamental idea of truancy is altogether associated with negative consequences, which Mr. Mishra strives to abolish …show more content…

But before these reasons are identified, it should be clearly noted that due to the consistent truancies of these irresponsible teachers, children’s already low performance in India has fallen even lower. Pratham Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization that conducts household surveys for informational and research purposes, has found that in 2014, less than 50 percent of the original amount fifth graders in rural India could read at second-grade level. What this meant was that however much the number of students that could read at second-grade level was years prior to recent survey findings, only half of that amount was able to read at that level now. Slowly, educational decline is gradually getting worse as teachers continue their truancy. According to the article, teacher truancy is the reason for educational failure in India among the youth. Also, the main reasons for teacher truancy is not due to lack of proper resources or facilities as one may assume, but simple because of laziness. In India, teaching jobs pay sufficiently well for those who are able to attain them, but the problem is from bias and political connections that get unqualified people teaching jobs. The laziness factor plays a huge role in that those who do end up successfully getting the job become too lazy to even go to work. Simply, they do not want to travel long distances to remote areas where many schools are located. Regardless of how these teachers may attempt to reason their decisions, the sole factor is strong enough to determine that their justifications cannot be measure to any degree of

Open Document