REMEDIAL WORK is costing the education system, and ultimately the national economy, a great deal of money. The financial crisis faced by the Government, even as there is a renewed emphasis on education, should bring this area of inefficiency into sharp focus.
The matter of the cost of remediation was again raised by High School Principal, Alphansus Davis, in a face-to-face public forum with the Minister of Finance in Spaldings recently. Davis, the immediate past president of the Association of Principals and Vice-Principals of newly upgraded high schools, charged that resources are being wasted in the system. This is a shameful fact.
Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies, found it "puzzling or close to madness that you get a child from grade one who has not mastered grade one, but yet the child is still promoted to grade two. There is no chance that a child who cannot read will be able to master the next grade." The non-reader is passed to the secondary level.
Each level, Mr. Davis pointed out, is saddled with the responsibility of fixing the failure of the one below it. Even at tertiary level, entire sections of the system are geared towards bringing students up to speed for the requirements of higher education or towards offering second chances to repeat what should have been mastered earlier. The cost of remediation must add up to billions of dollars, money which could be better used to get it right the first time.
We agree with the Minister, who pays, that greater performance accountability should be built into the system. Elements of the teaching profession are resistant to the idea of measurement of performance by output but the education product cannot be so unique that reasonable ways cannot be devised to measure performance as a vital step in improving efficiency. We cannot afford the human and monetary costs of failure and corrective action on the scale which now prevails in the nation's education system.
A great deal of the resources necessary for improving the system is already in the system but is being wasted. The new Education Task Force should tackle with some urgency this matter of the large-scale waste of scarce resources allocated to the system through the upward spiral of remediation.
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