Abdul Jaleel K - Selected for The Social Hackathon 1.0
Abdul Jaleel is currently working as teacher. He persuaded post graduation in sociology in one of the eminent Indian central university, Hyderabad central university. His dreams is to work for the very common people in the society.
SOCIAL ISSUE
I notice a social injustice in the education sector in my village. The average student in my village goes to tuitions and coaching centres. But due to financial problems, some very interested students are not able to go to tuition or coaching centre.
PROPOSED SOLUTION
We need to find those who are losing their education due to such financial problems and mobilize the help they need with the support of the people and thereby start a centre in our village to ensure education for such children.
CONCERNS
Most of the students in my village go to tuition centres and coaching centres like this. When a financially distressed student came to me and told me about this problem, I felt that they needed a tuition centre in my village to study.
PROJECT:
Justice and equality in education
DESCRIPTION
Indian society suffers from substantial inequalities in education, employment, and income based on caste and ethnicity. Compensatory or positive discrimination policies reserve 15% of the seats in institutions of higher education and state and central government jobs for people of the lowest caste, the Scheduled Caste; 7.5% of the seats are reserved for the Scheduled Tribe. These programs have been strengthened by improved enforcement and increased funding in the 1990s. This positive discrimination has also generated popular backlash and on-the-ground sabotage of the programs. This paper examines the changes in educational attainment between various social groups for a period of nearly 20 years to see whether educational inequalities have declined over time. We use data from a large national sample survey of over 100,000 households for each of the four survey years—1983, 1987–1988, 1993–1994, and 1999–2000—and focus on the educational attainment of children and young adults aged 6–29. Our results show a declining gap between daLits, Adivasis, and others in the odds of completing primary school. Such improvement is not seen for Muslims, a minority group that does not benefit from affirmative action. We find little improvement in inequality at the college level. Further, we do not find evidence that upper-income groups, the so-called creamy layer of dalits and adivasis, disproportionately benefit from the affirmative action programs at the expense of their lower-income counterparts. The past century has been characterized by a massive worldwide educational expansion. Increasingly complex economies demand a better-educated workforce. Moreover, in a globalizing world culture, nation-states are increasingly expected to take over the duty of educating citizens (Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992). However, whether educational expansion is sufficient to reduce educational inequalities or whether explicit affirmative action is needed to remain thorny issues facing many national governments, with little empirical evidence to guide future policies. Research on educational stratification suggests that inequality in education between different social strata continues and sometimes even widens in spite of educational growth (Halsey, Heath, and Ridge 1980; Hauser and Featherman 1976). Results from a path-breaking project comparing educational changes across 13 diverse countries shows that with two exceptions, the impact of parental socioeconomic status on children’s educational opportunity remained stable or even widened (Shavit and Blossfeld 1993). Widening socioeconomic differences are particularly evident at upper levels of education. Perhaps the most ironic finding in this line of research is that in communist societies, too, cultural capital reflected in father’s educational level increased children’s chances of gaining higher education (Treiman, Ganzeboom, and Rijken 2003), and even as access to education became universal in primary school, ethnic inequalities widened in high school (Hannum 2002). The literature on why these inequalities persist or even widen in spite of the increases in overall educational levels remains poorly developed. However, some insights from cultural reproduction theorists (Bourdieu 1973; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Collins 1979) may be useful in deepening our understanding. These theorists have argued that educational certificates exclude the marginalized groups from high-prestige jobs and, hence, educational systems devised by the elites often contain many hurdles that aid in excluding the subordinate groups from higher education. This may be particularly relevant given that educational expansion is often associated with economic changes that call for higher educational levels. This observation has led to the hypothesis of maximally maintained inequality, which suggests that educational inequality remains unchanged until enrolment at a given level reaches the saturation point, estimated at around 95% of the population completing that level of education (Raftery and Hout 1993). These arguments pose serious challenges to nation-states seeking ways of reducing educational inequalities between various social strata. If educational expansion as well as generally egalitarian education policies fail to diminish educational disadvantages for marginalized groups, what alternatives are available for policy intervention? Affirmative action, or positive discrimination, has been seen as one avenue for directly reducing educational inequalities (Pong 1993). However, while the empirical evidence described above suggests that educational expansion does not lead to reduction in educational inequalities based on social origin, few studies have examined the success or failure of affirmative action programs empirically. Although it is usually not feasible to directly evaluate the consequences of affirmative action, India provides an interesting natural experiment because affirmative action policies have been implemented for nearly half a century, with the benefits restricted to some clearly defined disadvantaged groups but not others. Given half a century of the existence of affirmative action programs that were strengthened in the 1990s, this paper, which seeks to evaluate changes in educational inequalities, compares the educational achievements of three groups: (a) historically advantaged groups, (b) disadvantaged groups that are subject to affirmative action, and (c) disadvantaged groups that are not subject to affirmative action.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
GOAL 4: Quality Education
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