Examining the Preparedness for Achieving Goal 4 of the SDGs in India: A Case Study on School Governance vis-à-vis Outcome for Primary Schools in Rural Maharashtra

Abstract

The study inspects the status of school governance and school outcome at primary school level and set up roadmap for all the stakeholders to achieve the mandate of Goal 4 in SDGs within 2030, especially in the context of rural India. The status of school governance and school outcome are assessed under 4 dimensions and 16 parameters through a survey of 21 rural primary schools from rural Maharashtra. Two different indices have been constructed for school outcomes and school governance using multi-stage principal component analysis. Public and private-aided schools are compared according to the degree of accountability and transparency. It has been realized that there is an absolute need for strong school governance at ground level which is very poor across public schools in rural India. The study followed the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project and ASER (2014) and considered these baselines to find the present status of school governance and school outcome for the present study.