Martin Henry
In the lull of summer, with school out, what's happening with the Education Transformation project?
While 'GSATters' cool their heels, several thousand grade 4 students from the last school year are reading and writing their way through a Summer Literacy Remediation Programme. "Poor literacy rate at grade 4" was one of the issues identified in the assessment of the current state of education by the Education task force.
And while grade 4 students are taken through their 3Rs, principals are working through school leadership and management skills in summer training as part of the response to the governance and management issues in the school system raised by the task force. The task force has recommended the strengthening of governance and management at school level.
At the turn of summer, this newspaper ran a little story, 'Institutions managed like businesses do better'. Or more to the point, as famous management thinker Peter Drucker has put it, managing non-profit organizations including public sector agencies in a business-like manner yields better results. The Gleaner article spoke of using the balanced scorecard approach in education. The balanced scorecard is a management and measurement tool enabling organizations of whatever type to clarify their vision and strategy and to convert them into goal-achieving action.
A wide-ranging consultative approach to education transformation has been used to generate on paper a national vision for education under the motto, 'Every child can learn? Every child must.' How this will be effectively sold to all stakeholders and translated into goal-seeking action on the ground is the big issue at stake.
The Education task force identified a whole slew of learning performance problems in the system as it stands today. Behind these problems are issues of how education is conducted and managed.
Madam Minister in her contribution to the Sectoral Debate has announced the establishment of an Education Inspection Agency to come on stream next school year. There was an old inspection system for which schools 'dolled up' for inspectors' visit, but not much changed after visits.
Much of the modern 'inspection' can and should be done from a computer terminal. If, as Minister Henry-Wilson has told the nation, the purpose of revamped inspection is to assess the achievement of learning outcomes and how the school is using the resources available, the ministry has powerful tools at its disposal in the National Assessment Programme.
Teachers have been showing great aversion to a performance appraisal system. But an input/output model of sufficient sophistication can be used to yield powerful appraisal data on students, teachers, schools, principals, and on the ministry itself. The Jamaica Teachers' Association should spend its time working on the model, not resisting its inevitable introduction.
I am more cautious than the task force, about the merits of a licensing and certification system, for all teachers. The system of course has its great merits and is widely used internationally. But one of its major drawbacks is the exclusion from teaching of educated and enthusiastic people who don't have teacher training.
I belong to that minority school of thought which holds, with strong support, that content competence linked to passion is far more significant in good teaching than pedagogic technique. One of my visions for education transformation is that young and sharp tertiary graduates can be induced to devote the first few years of their working lives to giving back to education as non-career teachers. Basic pedagogic skills can be quickly learned on the job through a little structured training programme and good mentoring. Government can offer the inducement of full-financing of education in exchange for two years of teaching. A cadre of young graduates under business-like administrators and backed by ICT resources could work miracles of transformation.
The bold transformation results which the Education task force wants to see by 2015 won't happen if those results are dependent on spending an extra $10-$15 billion per year added to an over-sized education budget for 10 years as the task force is proposing. We shall have to look to cheaper ways of achieving education transformation and the task force has correctly underscored the power of ICT for the transformation.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
