THE INTENSITY of public debate on the state of education has subsided somewhat after the initial shock effect of the Dennis Minott Report on the performance of secondary schools in the 2003 CXC examinations.
Some basic facts remain however which will have to be addressed if the slide is to be halted quickly. Jamaica is consistently at or near the bottom of the pile for performance in the standardised CXC exams among participating Caribbean countries. This is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to be treated as a 'nine-day wonder'. This must not be allowed to fall off the radar of public discussion.
The business of the secondary school, new or old, upgraded or traditional, is to provide post-primary education terminating in external examinations which are measures of performance against objectives. Inequities in the system have been glaringly exposed by the controversial Minott report. And those inequities are not just about the allocation of students from the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) and the allocation of resources, as variable as these are. Those inequities also include what happens inside individual schools by way of leadership, quality of teaching, efficiency of resource use, parental and community support, discipline, and so on.
Coming on the heels of the performance exposure of schools, the Ministry of Education has announced a strategic intervention programme focusing first on English and mathematics. This is geared towards raising national performance in these two fundamental subjects by five percentage points over three years. The intervention, scheduled to begin with the new school year in September, will target, in the first instance, 62 low-performance secondary schools and five technical high schools. This sounds like sensible management by objectives which has come to be the modus operandi in the business world where there are no tax dollars to pay for failure.
The programme will include, teacher training, remediation, regular evaluation and improved supervision, and the use of information and communication technologies as teaching/learning tools. A far wider and more aggressive intervention is urgently necessary to catch and eliminate illiteracy at the start of the secondary level, while working backwards to stop it at source in the earlier grades of the primary level. The push for raising CXC performance levels will soon run into the illiteracy roadblock if not removed from the system by decisive action.
The Ministry of Education must also spend some time carefully scrutinising why some schools in fairly similar circumstances are outperforming others. The concept of the master teacher should be extended to the master school and these models of performance used to help drag the system up.
It is incumbent on all stakeholders parents, teachers, administrators, government policymakers to keep the spotlight on education to ensure that our students are being properly trained to take their place and play useful roles in a modern society.
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