On the eve of independence day, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal sent a message to the country through a video which was telecasted on Doordarshan and also shared on the official social media pages of Arvind Kejriwal and Aam Aadmi Party.

In the video around 4:40, Arvind Kejriwal said that he is feeling happy to say that "in last 2 years Delhi Government schools have achieved better results than private schools and probably it has happened for the first time in the country".

In our investigation, we found that the claims made by Arvind Kejriwal in the video are factually incorrect. When we talk about schools results, we need to consider the results of both class 10th and class 12th.

Class 12th Result: Arvind Kejriwal's claim that Delhi Government schools have done better than private schools in the last 2 years is correct. 

Here is a graph comparing the results of class 12th since 2013. Credit: Factly

From the graph, it is clear that Delhi Government schools have done better than private schools. But Delhi’s government schools scoring a higher pass percentage than private schools is not new. While AAP has been in Delhi government only since 2015, there were similar results in 2013 and 2014 too. Even in 2012, Government schools in Delhi had registered a pass percentage of 87.70 percent while it was 87.53 percent in 2011. Source

The pass percentage of Government schools has gone up by 2.37%, from 88.27% (in 2017) to 90.64% in 2018.

It is evident from the above dataset that the result of class 12th of Delhi Governments Schools has been consistent in last 7-8 years.

Conclusion: Kejriwal's claim that result it has happened for the first time since independence is factually incorrect.

Class 10th Result

In 2018, Private schools in the Delhi region had a pass percentage of 89.45 while government-aided institutions had a pass percentage of 69.96. Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas and Kendriya Vidyalayas which are funded by central Government had the highest pass percentage in the Delhi region with 98.63 and 97.03 respectively. The national pass percentage was 86.70 (Source).

Conclusion: For class 10th Kejriwal's claims are completely false.

A possible reason for better results of the Government schools in class 12th

As per reports, only 28% of the Government schools provide Science stream in class 12th. According to data compiled by a lawyer-activist Yusuf Naqi using the Directorate of education website and several RTI replies, only 279 schools across Delhi have science stream out of 1,029. The official number of schools offering science stream is 291 which is roughly 28%.  

According to Delhi government officials, schools offering science stream have come down over the last decade because the number of students meeting the eligibility criteria, too, has fallen. “Not enough kids have been scoring high enough to be given the science stream in schools,” said Atishi Marlena, advisor to education minister Manish Sisodia. She added that to offer science at the senior secondary level, labs need to be made available to students. “We are still working on the infrastructure. Every science lab needs classroom space, and we need at least 2-3 labs in a school when offering science. We have planned to add another 13,000-classroom space in the long term”.

In general, science stream is considered tougher than any other streams and the failure rate is more in the science stream. Since most of the private schools offer science stream, it is not right to compare the result of the Government and the private schools at senior secondary level. At most, we can compare the results of class 10th where the subjects offered are the same and the passing percentage of Delhi government schools in class 10th is very less.

P.S: We at Fact Hunt acknowledge that the economic backgrounds of students at Government schools stand nowhere in comparison to the students of private schools. We also acknowledge that the Delhi Government has done tremendous work in last few years to improve the infrastructure of the Government schools. But we don't agree with Kejriwal's claim that education can be revolutionized in a few years as data tells a different story.