Education indisputably remains vital to improving the long-term development prospects of any country in the modern word. Despite reiterating goals of ensuring universal education, however, Pakistan continues to struggle with problems of illiteracy and the inadequate quality of education, especially in its public schools, where a majority of the children in the country are enrolled. Improving the quality of teaching in the public school system is a precondition to achieving the goal of providing a good education to the children of our country.
Addressing the challenges facing the teaching profession in the public sector is, however, not a small task. There are nearly 700,000 public school teachers across Pakistan, making them the largest category of government employees. Some of the issues affecting teaching quality in the public sector include inadequately trained teachers and rampant absenteeism on the one hand, and poor working conditions, excessive non-teaching duties, unfair terms of employment and demotivating service structures on the other hand.
Education decision-makers in the country have been taking evident steps in recent years to address some of the lingering grievances concerning inadequate pay for government school teachers. They have tried to improve the quality of teaching by upgrading qualification requirements for recruitment and promotion of teachers, and also tried to put in place various monitoring mechanisms to curb the problem of teacher absenteeism. However, inadequate attention has been paid to engaging with teacher unions as the means to improve teaching. Not only the government, but also donor agencies, as well as educationists and even the mass media, have often perceived teacher unions as obstacles rather than positive agents for change.
The Alif Ailaan Campaign for education has released an insightful research report which argues that teacher unions are essential to any concerted effort aimed at improving the reach and quality of Pakistan’s education system. It also points out, for instance, that while teacher unions have been able to achieve important victories in negotiating better service conditions for their members, these unions do not engage with other vital issues such as learning outcomes, examinations, or even teaching methodology.
Exclusion of teacher unions from the broader education reform process is not the fault of the unions alone. Teacher unions have been repressed and delegitimised by multiple governments, which have been denying them the capacity to evolve into more responsible entities. Most provincial governments and education departments still remain focused on punitive and coercive measures to keep teachers’ demands in check, rather than involving them as relevant constituents in the process of improving public education. Such an antagonistic approach has prevented the development of teachers associations as inclusive, professional and financially independent entities. The informal patron-client relationships between politicians and teacher unions may serve the short-term interests of some union members, but it damages the credibility and effectiveness of teacher unions in the long run.
In order to make teacher unions play a positive role in improving the state of education, it is necessary for provincial governments and our donor agencies to stop sidelining them. Besides capacity-building and encouraging transparent electoral processes in teacher unions to make them more representative, teacher unions must be allowed to participate in the formulation of education policy and management of the public education system. Teacher unions themselves must also realise the need to become more than pressure groups for increasing teacher salaries, and begin offering help in improving teaching standards so that they become a more vital part of the solution to addressing the education challenges in our country.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 8th, 2015.
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