Barring Karachi, all districts at rock bottom in nationwide rankings

Karachi
More than two years since the enactment of the free and fair education law by the Sindh Assembly, a first in the country, the only region from Sindh to be included in the top 50 performing districts of education is Karachi.
According to the third annual district rankings report by Alif Ailaan and Sustainable Development Policy Institute, on the whole, the performance in education indicators for Sindh has remained poor, with only the megacity of Karachi being included in the top 50 regions of the country.
The second district in Sindh to be performing ‘well’ is Hyderabad. However, nationally it has a rank of 62 out of the total 148 districts in the country. The worst performing district in Sindh is Thatta, which ranks 127 nationally.
The rankings also provide an education score (from 0 to 100) for each district based on a number of indicators including enrolment, infrastructure, gender parity and learning outcomes from data available from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey, National Education Management Information System and the Annual Status of Education Report.
According to this year’s findings, 19 out of the total 25 districts in Sindh scored more than 50 in the education score, while only Karachi managed to secure more than 70. Only four districts of Sindh ranked in the top half of the education scores.

Primary education
In the category of primary education, Sindh dropped a place this year, from fifth to sixth place, out of the total eight regions in Pakistan.
Last year, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa had been in the sixth place, but this year it moved up a rank with around 13 percent improvement in its education score. On the other hand, Sindh’s score dropped by around one percent to 61 from 62, out of the total of 100.
This year, Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) remained at first place for the third consecutive year, Azad Jammu Kashmir was second, Punjab at third, Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) fourth, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) fifth, Sindh sixth, Balochistan seventh and, lastly, FATA at eighth spot.
Even though there was a drop of 3.6 percent in Balochistan’s score, FATA’s overall score improved by 15 percent.
Karachi stands at the 43rd place in terms of education nationally, followed by Hyderabad at 62 and Naushahro-Feroze in the 72nd spot. Their education scores for this year are 72.5, 67.3 and 63.6, respectively.

Infrastructure
Punjab stood first with the highest score of 86.9 in school infrastructure, followed by ICT with a score of 86.6.
KPK and Sindh maintained their third and fourth places, respectively, and scored 70.4 and 47. In fifth place is Gilgit-Baltistan, FATA, Balochistan and Azad Jammu Kashmir (AJK). However, the national school infrastructure score rose to 62.2 from 57.6 last year.
In this category, Karachi ranks 49 with a score of 72.2, followed by Larkana at 52nd place with a score of 70.3 and Shaheed Benazirabad at 55 with a score of 66.6.
Facing neglect
The report concludes that as the overall situation of education in Punjab and KPK improves, it continues to deteriorate in Balochistan and Sindh.
With Karachi being the only district scoring more than 70 in the education indicators, and the overall provincial score around 10 points below the national average, the findings attribute this status to governance failures on the provincial governments’ part.
Meanwhile, as the Sindh government claims to be serious in mitigating the education crisis in the province, two years after the passage of Free and Fair Education Act, the authorities have yet to frame the rules of business.
Without any rules of business to strategise the access to school and quality improvement for more than six million out-of-school children in the province, provision of free and fair education has become somewhat of a liability for the province.
This lack of direction reflects in the government’s management of education and the available resources.
Though the annual budget for education has been increasing consistently, the state of education in the province seems to stagnate, or worse, deteriorate, instead of improving, because of the misdirected allocations.
For the outgoing fiscal year, the Sindh government increased the education budget by 10 percent from last year, but most of the increase went toward salaries, while the development budget was reduced by at least 12 percent.
Eminent educationist Shahnaz Wazir Ali, who is also president of Szabist, believes that consolidation and collation of dynamic data, along with devolving education to districts would help the province improve quality and access to education.
“The policies do not reflect actual problems because they are made too far from where they are implemented,” she said, “There is a need to devolve education planning to the districts.”