In an otherwise good letter, Egerton Chang (Gleaner, June 19) alludes to the study done in the 1990s which claimed to rank schools according to the value added. This study, of course, was pseudo-scientific nonsense.

It has been pointed out before that, while it is reasonable to quantify the value added to a child's education over a five-year period, it is next to impossible to determine where that value was added. There are far too many variables that go into producing the results in each case for us to hold any school responsible for the failure or success of any number of students based on their results in CSEC.

What we needed to know from such data was whether or not a child with say a 90 per cent average in GSAT is likely to perform better at one school than another. My own observations, after having taught at four schools over almost 40 years, have led me to doubt that this is indeed so.

What makes a school good?

Many people have been talking about good schools and bad schools without really saying what precisely makes one better than the other. A professional educator who was once involved in the panel inspection at Campion once said to that it is a good school where, among other things, people are observed to move purposefully when the bell rings. But she went on to say that she could say the same thing about other schools such as Spaldings Secondary (now High). She also said that when she attended the English class, she did not observe anything significantly different in the teacher's performance than that of her counterpart at Norman Manley. They were both pretty competent and orthodox.

She was not trying to put down any school, but was merely making the point that there really is no Campion method of teaching English that is better than the Norman Manley method. In fact, when teaching brighter students, one does not need to be particularly creative or even competent. It is with younger and weaker students that one's pedagogical skills are honed.

Source of the problem

One of the points that I have been trying to get across to people in my letters to the press is that the traditional high school system is the main source of the problem we recognise in our failure to educate adequately our people. These schools have been given a protected zone in which they have been insulated from the problems that other schools must face. This often results in a sort of vanity among many of us which leads us to believe that by excluding weaker students from our cohort and subsequently getting impressive-looking results, we are somehow doing a wonderful job. Some of us will say that we only teach to get ones and twos, not realising that it must mean that we are excluding most students, since most students are not able to get ones and twos. There are some who will not take a child into their sixth form class unless he gets a distinction in the relevant subject at CSEC.

It is my view that much of the desire to teach bright children only, stems from a pedagogical laziness. We do not want to make the extra effort required to teach weaker students.

It is obvious that the cut-off point for schools must necessarily be determined by the limited number of available places. However, it ought to be a national cut-off point and students who score above it, even GSAT scholars, should be placed at the nearest school. It is only when you have such a system that we will be able to make effective comparisons and discover what really works. Criticising and ranking schools is of no use unless it tells us that.

I am, etc.,

R. HOWARD THOMPSON

Munro College

St Elizabeth