#14 The Curious Case of the Model Residential Schools
The unintended consequences of a well intentioned policy
Discussions
This post comes under the sub-section Discussions. Under Discussions you get to hear some policy gossip about some of the policy issues happening around you.
Model Residential Schools
I first visited a Model Residential School (MRS) for tribal children during my tenure as a Programme Manager of the Additional Skill Acquisition Programme. These schools were started exclusively for tribal children to resolve the educational challenges plaguing the community. My first impression of the system was that it worked well - students get free boarding, food, and education until the 12th standard.
Even in a socially progressive state like Kerala, the tribal community lives a life of exclusion and neglect with poor social indicators. In such a scenario, the MRS system ensured that a majority of tribal students studied until the 12th standard, which is no small achievement.
Recently, after working closely with the tribal community of Attappady as a Mahatma Gandhi National Fellow and with a bit more understanding of public policy, my views on the MRS started to change.
What set this transformation in motion was a youth aspiration study I conducted in Attappady. When analysing the study results, I encountered some curious data:
There were a large number of students opting for the humanities stream.
There was a dropout rate of nearly 72.1% after the 12th standard, with only a very small number opting for college education.
Even among those who join college, a large number drop out or fail to pass exams.
Almost all the students I talked to aspired to be forest guards or government staff.
For a long time, I wondered what was going wrong. Surely the students were getting career guidance sessions and knew that they had to apply for college admissions, get into a good college, and graduate to improve their professional prospects. Surely they knew they could become engineers, doctors, chartered accountants, and managers. I had to dig a little deeper to identify the unseen problems that were at play. I conducted one-on-one interactions with students who dropped out after 12th grade and during college, and the responses I received were enlightening.
Unintended Social Isolation
The law of unintended consequences says that actions of the Government always have effects that are unanticipated and/or unintended. The MRS, while being a well-intentioned public policy, suffers from precisely this - it unintentionally deepens the social isolation of the tribal community.
The majority of students from tribal communities are first-generation learners, meaning they are the first person in their families to receive a formal education. Their parents and relatives therefore would have spent almost their entire lives within their hamlets with minimal exposure to the outside world. In the MRS, the students meet other tribal students who are quite similar to them with similar backgrounds, world-views, and social exposure. Apart from the travels they make to their hamlets and back during vacations, their interaction with the outside world is limited.
This creates a scenario where the students’ aspirations remain more or less the same even with education as the people they are engaging with are individuals who are themselves not exposed to the vast prospects and opportunities available elsewhere.
Some of the students who dropped out of college suggested that they found it difficult to adjust to the competitive life in college. And those who dropped out after 12th said they found it difficult to suddenly apply for courses in far-away colleges although they wanted to.
Further, most of the youth aspired to be forest guards. Because in the world they see around them, the forest guard is the most powerful occupation. And for becoming one, studying humanities is enough which is not ‘as difficult as science’ as some students opined.
These are once again brought about by the serious social isolation they face which is exacerbated by MRS.
Anticipating the Unanticipated
Frederic Bastiat in his article What is Seen and That Which is not Seen says that
In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.
Government functionaries often encounter a problem like low education outcomes and immediately suggest a policy to resolve it like the MRS. In many instances, they fail to foresee the effects that are not seen immediately. These unseen effects can end up worsening the situation of the beneficiaries than improving them.
Bureaucrats and Government officials will do well to consider the unintended consequences brought about by a policy decision and try to foresee all possible effects of an action. If a particular course of action produces an effect that is far more detrimental than the problem it seeks to address, it is better not pursue that action in the first place.
Tribal children deserve to be educated for the jobs they aspire for. But the MRS policy has failed to achieve this. In fact it has in many ways worsened their plight.
Homework
Read the previous OPW article on unintended consequences.
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