Connecting families with schools: the bureaucratised relations of 'accountability' in Indian elementary schooling.

Increasing community and parental connection with schools is a widely advocated means of improving levels of student learning and the quality and accountability of education systems across South Asia. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of accountability relations in education in the Indian st...

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Published in:Third World Quarterly Vol. 43; no. 8; pp. 1875 - 1896
Main Authors: Dyer, Caroline, Jacob, Suraj, Patil, Indira, Mishra, Preeti
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd Aug2022
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Aug2022
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        10.1080/01436597.2022.2070469
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        atl: Connecting families with schools: the bureaucratised relations of 'accountability' in Indian elementary schooling.
      aug:
        au:
          Dyer, Caroline
          Jacob, Suraj
          Patil, Indira
          Mishra, Preeti
        affil:
          School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
          School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India
          International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), Udaipur, India
          Vidya Bhawan, Udaipur, India
      su:
        India
        Learning
        Family-school relationships
        Educational accountability
        Elementary education
        Educational quality
      sug:
        subj:
          Learning
          Family-school relationships
          Educational accountability
          Elementary education
          India
          Educational quality
      keyword:
        accountability relations
        bureaucratic relations
        community participation
        primary schooling
        accountability relations
        bureaucratic relations
        community participation
        primary schooling
      ab: Increasing community and parental connection with schools is a widely advocated means of improving levels of student learning and the quality and accountability of education systems across South Asia. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of accountability relations in education in the Indian states of Rajasthan and Bihar. It explores two questions: what formal platforms exist to enhance connections between socially disadvantaged families and the schools serving them; and (how) do they influence engagement with student learning? It finds that various platforms have proliferated across public, low-cost private and non-government schools. But, while they promote enrolment attendance and monitoring, a substantive focus on student learning is empirically demonstrated to be missing everywhere. The paper argues that an apparently surprising similarity of (dis)connection is located in system features that are common across school types, locations and social structures. It proposes that this is a 'field' in which connection, facilitated by various platforms, is performed according to bureaucratised norms of accountability that even pervade family and community responses. Seeing this as a socially constituted 'field' that constrains meaningful discussion of learning across schooling provision for disadvantaged families contributes new insight for accountability-focused reforms in education.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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