On Tuesday, the Ministry of Education released the first-ever Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) for the years 2018-19 and 2019-20.
The PGI-D index assesses the performance of the school education system at the district level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis.
The Indian education system is one of the largest in the world with about 15 lakh schools, 97 lakh teachers, and nearly 26 crore students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds.
It should be noted that the Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L) devised Performance Grading Index (PGI) for States and released reports for the reference years 2017-18 to 2019-20.
Based on the success of State PGI, 83-indicator-based PGI for District (PGI-D) has been designed to grade the performance of all districts in school education.
The data is filled by districts through an online portal. The PGI-D is expected to help the state education departments to identify gaps at the district level and improve their performance in a decentralized manner.
The indicator-wise PGI score shows the areas where a district needs to improve. The PGI-D will reflect the relative performance of all the districts on a uniform scale which encourages them to perform better.
The PGI-D structure comprises a total weightage of 600 points across 83 indicators, which are grouped under 6 categories, viz., Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities & Students’ Entitlements, School Safety & Child Protection, Digital Learning, and Governance Process.
These categories are further divided into 12 domains, viz., Learning Outcomes and Quality (LO), Access Outcomes (AO), Teacher Availability and Professional Development Outcomes (TAPDO), Learning Management (LM), Learning Enrichment Activities (LEA), Infrastructure, Facilities, Student Entitlements (IF&SE), School Safety and Child Protection (SS&CP), Digital Learning (DL), Funds convergence and utilization (FCV), Enhancing CRCs Performance (CRCP), Attendance Monitoring Systems (AMS) and School Leadership Development (SLD).
Grading Scale
PGI-D grades the districts into ten grades, viz., the highest achievable grade is Daksh, which is for districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in that category or overall.
The lowest grade in PGI-D is called Akanshi-3 which is for scores upto10% of the total points.
The ultimate objective of PGI-D is to help the districts to prioritize areas for intervention in school education and thus improve to reach the highest grade.
The PGI-D 2020–21 is presently under compilation. PGI-D 2018-19 and 2019-20 provide insight into the intra-State comparison of progress in school education.