RTE (Second Amendment) Act, 2019

The Act amends the provision of no detention till class 8^th and stated that a regular examination will be held in class 5 and class 8 at the end of every academic year. If a child fails the exam, he will be given additional instruction, and take a re-examination. If he fails in reexamination too, then the relevant state or central government may decide to allow schools to detain the child.

Positives of the second amendment

• It has been argued that automatically promoting all children to the next class reduces the incentive for children to learn and for teachers to teach.
• There has been declining learning levels noted in elementary education. Hence such a move would promote quality learning.

Issues with the second amendment

• Detaining a child could be counter-productive as it is de-motivating and leads to them dropping out of school.
• Poor learning outcomes could be due to lack of professionally qualified teachers, teacher absenteeism, limited infrastructure, and inadequate roll out of the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation method of teaching and assessment.
• In the Act it is mentioned that a re-examination would be conducted, but the detailed provision regarding who will conduct that exam is not stated.
• The state must balance the aspects of poor quality outcome with high dropout rate properly. This could be done by overcoming the structural follies of the Act like ensuring qualified teachers, ensuring healthy teacher-student ratio, reliving teachers of non-teaching activities etc.