How can we make government school teachers more accountable?

Governments can take multiple steps to improve teacher accountability. Tying promotions and job security to stricter performance standards would improve teachers’ accountability in government schools. Governments have tried to improve accountability in the past. Realising this goal is far from straightforward because unions, which protect most government school teachers, wield considerable political power and have repeatedly shown they will use it.

The headlines of the last year alone tell the story. Teachers in UP protested the introduction of an online attendance system until the state suspended the proposal. Unions in Maharashtra pushed back against workload expectations. A teachers’ association in Delhi sought to revoke guidelines on transfers. Across West Bengal, para-teachers went on strike demanding higher salaries. Each campaign targeted a modest attempt to improve accountability, and most states had to roll back reforms. This pattern shows that even reasonable reforms face organised resistance from unions with the power to block them.

Unionisation gives teachers the tools to rally around shared interests. They can organise strikes, make well-timed threats ahead of elections, and secure representation in the upper house of parliament. A shared interest in retaining privileges makes collective action rational and effective. Taking away those privileges could bring the system to a halt entirely. The threat of a strike makes any reform that threatens teacher interests politically costly.

The benefits of limited accountability are concentrated among teachers. The costs are dispersed across children, parents, and taxpayers who are too diffuse to organise in the same way. Poor learning outcomes, wasted public money, and children who cannot read or add affect millions, but no single group bears enough of the burden to match the organised power of teacher unions. This asymmetry makes accountability reforms extremely difficult to implement.