Editorial | Release all PEP data

Any improvement in Jamaica’s education outcomes must be welcomed.

So, Education Minister Fayval Williams should not be begrudged celebration of improved outcomes in this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams for sixth-grade students, the results of which were released last week.

Wisely, though, Minister Williams contained her victory lap, knowing that not only is there still a long way to fixing the education system, it remains in crisis.

That is why, as this newspaper has advocated, Ms Williams must take radical action, at least in the short term, to reset the mission of the island’s primary schools. Their focus must be on ensuring that every child who leaves the system at grade six is fully literate. She or he must read and write and do sums at their grade and age levels. That is a solid foundation upon which to build.

This mission of rebuilding and transformation, however, belongs not only to the minister and the government. It must be a national endeavour in which all Jamaicans are full participants. This requires that everyone knows fully the depth and scale of the problem, and the specifics and peculiarities associated therewith.

That is why, beyond the information already disclosed about the PEP outcomes, Minister Williams should release all the raw data, except for the names of students, related to the exam.

That would allow for a broader review of the information, other than that done by education ministry analysts.

Potential positives of such a review could include new, and clearer, perspectives on the data and creative initiatives to deal with the issues in primary education. This would be a bit like an open source approach to fixing education.

DEVELOP CRITICAL THINKING

The PEP process starts with a series of assessments of students at grade three, and culminates at grade six, with the final test of cohort’s (mostly children around age 12) readiness for high school.

Through a series of assessments and curriculum-based exams, PEP is supposed to develop critical thinking in students. It grades them in a range from ‘beginning’, where they demonstrate little or no competence in the grade curriculum; through ‘developing’, where they show some evidence of the required competence; ‘proficient’, which is when students display a clear grasp of what is required at the grade level; and ‘highly proficient’, which is an advanced competence in the curriculum.

This year, 60 per cent of the approximately 35,000 students who were assessed were ranked proficient, or highly proficient, compared to 41 per cent in 2019, when the exam was first administered, and 57 per cent last year. Comparisons with 2021 and 2022 are largely meaningless, given that the assessments were substantially scaled down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With respect to language arts and mathematics, the system’s core subjects, 67 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively, were on the proficiency spectrum. In language arts, the number was seven percentage points up on 2023. For maths, the increase was three percentage points. There were also other areas of improvement.

But there is a danger of being seduced into underplaying the education crisis, and the social dimensions of it, if the PEP positives are over-emphasised by the prism of success. What the data also reveal is that 40 per cent of the students completed primary school without being sufficiently proficient to fully absorb secondary education.

Seven per cent, or more than 4,000 of those students, are still in the ‘beginning’ stage, requiring very critical interventions if they are to be brought up to standard. Another 11,500 show some grasp of what they should have learnt by grade six, but will need help to take them over a hump.

But even this data likely mask worrying socio-economic dimensions of the problem.

For example, privately operated preparatory schools will have a disproportionate amount of children who get to attend their first-choice (the best) high schools. The government’s statement that 86.7 per cent of students got to attend a school of their choice is largely meaningless unless that is disaggregated in the context of the seven schools, in ranking order, students were required to select.

END POLICY OF AUTOMATIC PROMOTION

Further, it is important to analyse the performance of all government primary schools, including their locations, the socio-economic status of their students, their high school placements, and what proportion students of the poorest communities make up of the 40 per cent who fall below the PEP proficiency standard.

It is students from this category who will no doubt be channelled to schools like Denham Town High in west Kingston, where a reading remediation project last year found that 97 per cent of the students read way below their age and grade levels.

Denham Town was lucky for the intervention. Generally, as in primary schools, students of such schools are placed on escalators, carried from grade to grade, unable to absorb the secondary education for which they were ill-prepared.

The policy of automatic promotion must end.

At the high school level, there must be a massive programme of remediation in reading. In primary school, the policy must be that no child is promoted unless she or he meets the literacy and numeracy standard for the grade.

That policy must be backed by legislation and supported by a phalanx of reading specialists.

This reset to the basics to address a crisis will be expensive. But it is one expense that Jamaica can ill-afford not to make. The alternative is already far more costly.