BASED ON an initiative announced by President George Bush at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec in 2001, Mrs. Sue Cobb, the United States Ambassador to Jamaica, has launched a programme to upgrade over five years the teaching skills of some 5,000 primary school teachers in the Caribbean. This is expected to improve the reading ability of some 150,000 students.
Dubbed the Caribbean Centre of Excellence for Teacher Training (CETT), the programme in Jamaica will be under the direction of Professor Errol Miller and is designed to teach our teachers how better to instruct students in grades one to three to read properly, thus raising the level of literacy throughout the island.
At present in the Commonwealth Caribbean, 30 per cent of students are not functionally literate by the end of Grade six and the percentage is higher in Jamaica. This impediment tends to dog all the future academic activities of students up to and including the tertiary level. The CETT is being funded by the United States with US$20 million and is structured to include participation by aid agencies from several other countries as well as the Private Sector. We congratulate all concerned in getting it going.
In launching the CETT programme at the University of the West Indies, Prime Minister Patterson revealed that under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, government subsidies for tertiary education are unacceptable and could well present problems for his administration. If the deadline for objections to the WTO mandate has passed, the matter could be fait accompli and government will either have to discontinue subsidising tertiary education in Jamaica, now running at about 80 per cent of its economic cost, or grant an equivalent subsidy to any private, foreign university which wants to open its doors in Jamaica.
The Prime Minister appears upset at the WTO ruling because removal of the subsidy might deprive poor secondary school students from getting a university education. This may not necessarily be the case for scholarships and student loans can be substituted for the present across-the-board subsidy which encourages tertiary education geared to quantity rather than quality.
This is an issue on which we would like to hear the views of the National Council on Education, an institution that has recently revivified and gained respect by disaggregating the annual CXC results, an exercise that had focused new attention on the essential weaknesses of Secondary Education in Jamaica. Some major policy shifts could well come out of the proposed review.
Given our present economic stringencies, the WTO ruling might be a blessing in disguise, providing political cover for removing or reducing the subsidy, a proposal mooted some time ago by Dr. Omar Davies, the Minister of Finance. We urge public debate on this matter.
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