‘Driven in a Cart Pulled by Elephant and Horse Together’- the Perception of Government School Teachers about their Capacity Building through Public-Private Partnership

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the relevance and adequacy of capacity building initiatives from government school teachers’ point of view. The enrolment of students in government schools in India is dwindling due to poor teaching-learning practices and so to enhance the quality of education and supplement government’s efforts in capacity building of teachers a unique public -private partnership (PPP) based teacher mentor program has been initiated at Pune city in India. The data collected from both the survey and in-depth interview of fifty government school teachers were analyzed through framework approach to identify teachers’ perceptions on A) what according to them is effective capacity building, B) the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the ongoing PPP based training and C) their suggestions on the way forward. The findings reveal the deeper reasons for sub-optimal results despite the best intentions from both government and private partners. Metaphorically inferred, the PPP based capacity building is like an elephant and a horse pulling a cart together. Where ‘Elephant’ denotes the large, powerful yet bureaucratically slow placed government school system and ‘Horse’ represents the goals driven and fast-paced external (PNGE) specialist/ catalyst. The researchers hope that the insights from teachers’ ‘voices’ will help optimize the outcome envisaged by the PPP, and the findings will foster the advocacy for deep-rooted policy changes. https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.19.1.2