Editorial | CXC, STEM and reading

The Caribbean Examinations Council’s (CXC) intention to remove several STEM subjects from its offering is the result of not only low enrolment of students for the exams, or their poor performance in the tests.

It is also, in Jamaica’s case, one of the consequences of low reading skills or the poor preparation of students in this subject at primary school, and the illogic of the policy of promoting children from grade to grade, even when they cannot read, or do sums, at their age and grade levels. The upshot, over the long run, is the poor outcomes that characterise Jamaica’s education system, including low participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects.

In a way, the Orlando Patterson Commission on Education Transformation anticipated, and addressed, this issue with CXC in its report of more than two years ago, when it suggested that some of the mountain of cash to which the Government’s vocational education and training agency, HEART, had access (and was inefficiently spending) should be used to bolster early childhood education.

Said the report: “It is well established that both vocational training and early childhood education are critically important parts of the overall education offering. There are, however, meaningful differences between the two. First is the obvious fact that one is an important pre-condition for the other. That is, students who are able to take full advantage of Jamaica’s system of vocational training will, in general, have received an effective early childhood education.

“Conversely, students without the benefit of an effective early childhood education will tend to experience disadvantages throughout the remainder of their educational experience.”

The larger point is that a sound early childhood/primary education foundation is critical for children to absorb education at the secondary and higher levels.

POST-PRIMARY INTERVENTIONS

As the Patterson Commission highlighted, up to a third of Jamaica’s students complete their primary education functionally illiterate and in need of substantial remedial help. That, often, is not forthcoming at the scale, or with the intensity, required.

Indeed, in its analysis of the result of the 2019 Primary Exit Profile exams of grade six students (mostly 12-year-olds), the Commission found that 56 per cent of the students couldn’t write and “and 57 p er cent could not identify information in a single sentence”.

There has been some improvement since then, but large swathes of Jamaican children continue to enter high school ill-prepared for secondary education. In last year’s PEP exams, of more than 36,000 students who did the tests, 60 per cent met the proficiency standards in language arts. However, looked at from the other side, that meant that four in 10 of those students, or over 14,000 children, did not make the cut and would have to catch up in high school. In maths, 43 per cent (over 15,000 students) required post-primary interventions if they were to be ready for this subject at high school.

The situation of Denham Town High School in western Kingston – where a reading intervention by an NGO, Creative Language Based Learning Foundation (CLBL), has shown great promise – underlined the depth of the reading crisis that confronts many high schools, especially those in poor communities.

At the start of the last academic year, CLBL found that a mere 2.6 per cent of Denham Town’s 650 students could read anywhere near their grade levels. In other words, at high schools like Denham Town, which start with inflows of largely illiterate students at grade seven, teachers cannot meaningfully adhere to a secondary education syllabus. The schools, in essence, become conveyor belts of underachievement and failure.

CRITICAL MISSION

If students can’t read at the most basic level, they can hardly be expected to sign up for courses in, say, green engineering, design technology, or agriculture science, which are among the subjects that CXC wants to cut from its advanced CAPE exams roster, because too few students across the region register for its tests. And those who do generally perform poorly.

This newspaper, of course, does not agree with CXC’s proposed solution to this problem, which is to deprive those regional students who do the subjects of the services of a globally recognised certification body. CXC should instead work with regional partners, including governments, in training more teachers for STEM subjects and improving the teaching skills of those who are in the system.

But more critically, especially with respect to Jamaica, the critical mission of primary schools at this time must be to ensure that every child who completes this level of education is literate and numerate, and therefore capable of absorbing secondary education, whether that is in vocational training or traditional academics.

The education ministry must end its policy of annually promoting children, regardless of their reading proficiency. No student should be promoted unless he or she is able to read at his or her grade and age level. That policy should be underpinned by legislation and supported by an army of reading specialists, who can mount interventions where necessary.

This newspaper has several times highlighted the success of this approach in several southern US states, especially Mississippi, which has moved from the bottom of states for reading for lower-grade students, to be among the top 20 states. Concomitant with this improvement in reading since the 2010s, Mississippi has lifted its high school graduation rate from 75 per cent to over 90 per cent.

There are obvious lessons here for Jamaica.