ABSTRACT
‘Notes on Quality in Education’ develops a framework to guide the normative judgement of quality of an institution, a programme or a system of education. Various approaches to quality in education are examined, and quality is constructed as a multidimensional ‘master concept’, involving aims of education, provisioning of infrastructure and teachers, curriculum and pedagogy, standards adopted, learning outcomes and accountability. Empirical studies of quality are reviewed, and it is suggested that for comparisons of or judgements on quality in education, all of these dimensions need to be examined. This raises a wider set of questions and the possibility of comparison with regard to stratification and diversity within the Indian schooling system, between management types and across economic classes than is popularly examined in the research literature. This framework is used in the two empirical studies reported in Chapters 7 and 8.
