EDITORIAL - JTA silly amid dismal educational outcomes

In the event that the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) and its president, Paul Adams, were unaware, or may have forgotten, we wish to remind them of a few important statistics.

In the 2011 numeracy test among grade-four students, the numbers deemed to have achieved mastery, that is, achieving a score of 50 per cent or above, increased by eight percentage points.

Don't do hooplas or turn somersaults as yet. For although the improvement was significant, it still meant that only 49 per cent of the students mastered all the inventories of numeracy.

There is another point, too. The mastery level in government-run primary schools was three percentage points below the national figure.

Or, put another way, the natural average was dragged up by the performance of private preparatory schools, where the pass rate was approximately 80 per cent, and near-mastery 16.5 per cent.

Abysmal outcomes

The JTA is, perhaps, also aware that nearly a fifth of the students who enter secondary school are significantly ill-prepared for that level of education. The teacher union might know, too, that hardly more than 20 per cent of high-school students, after five years in the system, pass sufficient Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate subjects in a single sitting to matriculate to university.

We draw attention to these things in the face of the JTA's attitude to the education ministry's designation of last Friday, February 24, as National Training Day.

Apparently, the ministry told teachers that they would, on that day, be required to attend regional training workshops. Those who were not assigned to training would be expected to be at school.

It so happens that the ministry had also designated February 23 and 24 the midterm school break for the Easter session. Scheduling the workshops then made sense to us, but not to the JTA.

As we understand it, the midterm break, as are other periods of recess from school - except where it is particularly demarcated for teachers - is for students. The JTA, though, believes that a school break, such as last week's, belongs to teachers.

Unwise bickering

The upshot was that it bickered over its members being called to training workshops and loudly suggested to teachers that they were under no obligation to attend. Mr Adams, however, qualified this by saying that the union was not discouraging participation.

A number of things are important, not least the fact that few employees, anywhere, are afforded as much time off from work than Jamaican teachers - over summer, Christmas into the New Year, and at Easter - although we acknowledge that some of this time is used for exam marking.

But more to the point is our poor educational outcomes. While the weaknesses in Jamaica's education system cannot all be blamed on teachers, the poor performance of our students is, in part, the result of the quality of the pedagogy.

Training sessions such as those organised by the education ministry are designed to improve the knowledge of teachers and their pedagogic skills. It is not unlike firms providing training for their staff and making it mandatory that they attend.

The question for Mr Adams and the JTA executive is whether they are satisfied with educational performance in Jamaica.

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