MAXINE HENRY-WILSON, the Education Minister, has had the courage to publicly acknowledge that the best performing students in the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) continue to be assigned to a handful of elite schools. Public concerns have long been expressed from the days of the Common Entrance Examination about the award of secondary school places.
The GSAT applies three criteria for assignments to schools: choice, geographical location, and performance. The three can be mutually contradictory and despite calls for transparent resolution, none has been forthcoming. Clearly, parents and students will want to select schools which already have a track record of performance.
Proximity to a particular school may mean distance from quality. And there have been horror stories of students sent miles away from home, past many school, to institutions of lower quality in the public perception. If high performance does not provide the advantage to a child of being assigned to a top-quality school of choice, what would be the incentive to strive to do well in the placement exam, which the GSAT is, like the discarded CEE?
The minister now says there are clear inequities in the system which the society as a whole will have to address. We hope the call for society as a whole to address the problem is no indication of passing the buck.
In fairness to the minister, she has inherited a system of inequity which has had a long evolution. A multi-tiered system of secondary education was deliberately created by successive administrations since Independence as alternative types of institutions were added to the few old traditional high schools.
Staffing, funding, infrastructure and student competence were deliberately different among the categories of institutions. The recent attempted deconstruction of that system and the creation of a more unified one through upgrading various secondary schools to "high schools" has created equity in name but not in quality.
There is a real dilemma facing the minister, the Government and the society. The upgraded high schools will need quality students (and teachers) to match the provision of equivalent funding and infrastructure in order to improve performance to the level of the traditional high schools.
But while choice remains a factor in place assignments, students will continue to select "the name brand schools" and higher performers will be assigned to these institutions if choice is respected over random distribution. Minister Henry-Wilson used our own Editors' Forum last Thursday to place the issue squarely on the agenda.
We encourage stakeholders and experts in education to make their voices heard on this matter which the minister concedes is doing harm to the country's education system and which requires complete and thorough investigation, and action.
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