Education performance and failing schools

In the case of primary schools, a basic minimum standard can easily be set and monitored from GSAT scores. As I have been saying for years, the National Assessment Programme (NAP) for primary education provides a powerful and comprehensive tool not just for assessing the students, but for assessing schools, school leadership and individual teachers. The NAP encompasses the Grade One Learning Readiness Inventory, the Grade Three Diagnostic Test for English and Mathematics, the Grade Four Literacy Test, and the Grade Six Achievement Test. Minister Holness now seems determined to use NAP data to drive management of the system.

At the secondary level, there is no NAP equivalent. A hodgepodge of CXC passes now determines 'performance'. The minister has floated the idea of a general high-school diploma which would require achieving minimum standard competencies to be awarded. As usual, this eminently sensible proposal has been greeted with erudite objections from elements of the education Establishment.

If one takes the minimum number of CXC passes with which the high-school graduate can do something meaningful, like entering tertiary education or starting at the bottom of the professional job market, as the measure of performance, the vast majority of secondary schools are failing. No more than about 10 per cent of each year's graduating cohort passes five subjects, and if the mandatory core subjects of English and mathematics are singled out for inclusion, the percentage is even lower.

So while the newspapers have been plastering profiles of star performers in this year's CXC examinations all over their A pages, and schools which can't meet the utilities bills have been running expensive advertisements presenting their top performers, commercial privately operated universities have been advertising upgrade programmes for people who don't meet minimum entry requirements, all universities and colleges are pouring globs of scarce resources into remediation, the public community colleges and their private equivalents are heavily into the business of upgrade remediation, and the HEART Trust rolls on (since 1982) as a now permanent second-chance institution bankrolled by hundreds of millions of dollars extracted from businesses above their regular taxes.

The minister has earmarked four failing schools for intervention, noting that he could have closed his eyes in selecting the schools for intervention. The lucky, or unlucky, picks are Holy Trinity in Kingston; Glengoffe in St Catherine; Marcus Garvey Technical in St Ann; and Balaclava in St Elizabeth.

Some principals and other sector interests (which is code for the teachers' union, the JTA), one news story said, have questioned the minister's legal standing in intervening in the schools. Let's hurry to the courts! How could the ministry and the minister charged with the responsibility in the Government of Jamaica of directing education on behalf of taxpayers, citizens, students and parents not have the authority to intervene in schools?

Part of what is deeply wrong with education is the closed-door-ownership-of-the-system attitude of administrators and teachers and their union. Guest columnist Glenn Tucker is more than halfway right in his assertion last Tuesday in The Gleaner that the JTA is the biggest hindrance to educational progress.

Holness himself rebutted the Association of Principals and Vice-Principals of Secondary Schools and the JTA, telling them bluntly that "the operations of schools are not the private businesses of principals and boards. As long as they receive public funds, they must subject themselves to public scrutiny." The minister should now go well beyond intervention in a mere four failing schools and start publishing the student-performance data of schools, as a matter of course, for real public scrutiny.

Numerous reasons to fail

Yes, there will be a certain stigma attached to any school labelled 'failing'. So let's work away the stigma and not take the well-travelled route of not calling a spade a spade. Schools fail for a complexity of many reasons, as teachers and their union are never tired of reminding us in their 'don't-blame-us' remonstration.

One of the chief benefits of comparative analysis, which educators laden down with graduate degrees seem unwilling to appreciate, is that variables can be controlled by matching up likes and considering only one point of difference at a time. The data sets of the National Assessment Programme and of CXC, with a tad of computer power, make this perfectly possible. The bald fact of the matter is that some schools with the same sorts of resource issues, the same sort of student backgrounds, and the same sort of environment are doing better than others.

Let's start the intervention and restructuring at the top. In the world of serious business, CEOs are routinely asked to step aside when restructuring has to be done. Nothing personal, and certainly nothing malicious, as Minister Holness has said of the planned intervention in selected failing schools. Struggling Yahoo! has just let go its chief executive, Carol Bartz, "effective immediately", the board said, as the company seeks to push back against its competitors and build market share.

The principal of each school should be re-routed with no benefits lost, or separated with a golden handshake. The union should have little to complain about. A turnarounder should be installed with a 24-month timeline to produce measurable positive change.

Let's go to the other end of the system: The students. If students don't like the stigma of attending a failing school, let them do something about it - with help and encouragement and firm leadership. A circulating email in the failing schools debate has pointedly named students as critical factors in school failure. This is something the minister is gingerly tiptoeing around. Schools are overrun with indiscipline. Better-performing schools are universally those with better discipline.

Drastic student intervention must be imposed at two points: Students must conform to behaviour conducive to learning and teaching or must be pulled out of the system. One of the most urgent and important tasks of the turnarounder leaders of the selected schools is to spearhead the flushing out of learning unreadiness, chief of which is illiteracy.

Pleading platitude

In one of those nice messages for special occasions, Minister Holness wrote for UNESCO's International Literacy Day last Thursday that he was "urging our schools to make literacy a priority in practice". This is pleading platitude. At the primary level, literacy must be made the number one, perhaps the only, priority by executive order. And at the secondary level, the flushing out of residual illiteracy in lower school must be similarly a top priority. When children are literate, i.e. can read, comprehend, assess, and respond to text, everything is possible.

Teachers shouldn't want to work in a failing school. So they should get out; or pitch in with the turnarounder leader to change things in a positive direction. And getting out shouldn't merely be a personal option. Now that the ministry is in there live and direct, what should be done across the entire system should be done in these selected schools: Input/output performance assessments should be done against job retention.

Parents should not like failing schools for their children either. So help to turn them around. The schools should be building vibrant home-school associations (a better label than parent-teacher associations). A combination of carrot and stick should be applied to get parents engaged with the turnaround of the school.

The whole community should be hollering NIMBY and getting moving to help turn those NIMBY schools around. I have long advocated that post-secondary students can and should be deployed in primary and secondary schools as teacher aides, giving back a little something to a system which produced them as its best successes. The illiteracy problem could be easily licked with student literacy teachers given a little bit of training and some basic material to work with. I want to advise the minister - again - not to rely on scarce, high-priced literacy experts to solve the problem. JAMAL has taught us otherwise.

Jamaica has one of the worse performing education system in CARICOM, despite all the money thrown at it. If the intervention into the selected schools is done with boldness and vigour and simple, practical common sense, Holy Trinity, Glengoffe, Marcus Garvey and Balaclava will soon be model schools for a broader and deeper system transformation with stigma wiped out by performance.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist. Email a feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.