Editorial | Holy Trinity High, Patois and reading

The Gleaner reiterates its endorsement of Holy Trinity High School’s initiative to ensure that every student who enters the institution leaves fully literate, capable of absorbing more than basic education. If it works, the Holy Trinity High project – as well as the other programmes aimed at attacking the reading deficiency among Jamaican students – must be rapidly scaled up at the primary and secondary levels of the island’s education system.

There is a question, however, that remains unclear about the Holy Trinity High project: how it is resolving the tension between English, the language of instruction in Jamaican schools, and the island’s Patios, the mother tongue of the vast majority of Jamaicans, which these students mostly use in their homes and communities. And what is the education ministry’s attitude to the formal recognition of Patois and its place, if any, in the island’s classrooms?

People unaware of the details of facts are unlikely to grasp the profundity of Holy Trinity High’s mission. At the start of the current school year last September, of nearly 200 students enrolled at the school to begin their secondary education, fewer than one in 10 could read at their grade levels. More to the point, 96 per cent of them read up to three or four tiers below what is expected of students at grade seven.

Holy Trinity High School, unfortunately, is not unique. The reading crisis is replicated in schools in poor inner-city and rural communities across Jamaica. For instance, as this newspaper has highlighted in the past, the ratios are similar at Denham Town High School in west Kingston, where below-par readers were placed on a conveyor to becoming functionally illiterate ‘graduates’, until a special reading intervention two years ago.

DON’T MEET PROFICIENCY STANDARD

These children are among the one-third of Jamaican students who, each year, complete their primary education at grade six and do not meet the proficiency standard in reading for that grade level. Over half the students have trouble extracting information from simple English sentences.

The same Primary Exit Profile tests show that over 40 per cent of grade-six students fail to meet the proficiency mark in maths. And as is the case with language arts, seven per cent who do not meet the standards are considered, after six years of primary education, to be at the beginner’s stage in the subjects.

That is the context of Holy Trinity High’s so-called Grade Seven Academy. The first two years of the education under the school’s recently launched project is concentrated on lifting the children’s reading and basic mathematics skills, as well as character building.

The project is modelled on a system that delivered the so-called Mississippi Miracle, referring to the southern US state, which, over a dozen years, lifted itself from being 49th of America’s 50 states in grade-four literacy, to its current status of fourth in reading. Mississippi, like other southern US states that faced a reading crisis, halted the escalator of promotion for students who could not read, as well as introduced new teaching techniques.

In Faith Alexander, recently the chief transformation officer at the education ministry, Holy Trinity High has the benefit of someone with a full grasp of the Mississippi programme and similar initiatives, having worked in teaching, and education management and planning in education systems across the United States, including in Louisiana, where reforms, akin to Mississippi’s, helped to ratchet up reading/education standards.

Also involved is Grace Baston, the former principal of Campion College, and like Holy Trinity High School, a Roman Catholic-owned institution which, ranked by exam passes, is Jamaica’s top high school.

ADVOCATE FOR PATOIS

Ms Batson, however, has been an advocate for the recognition of Jamaican Patois as a language in its own right and its use in the education system.

In a speech last November at the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The University of the West Indies, Mona, Ms Baston pointed that in 40 high schools Jamaica, most of the grade-seven students read “at grade-three, grade-two, grade-one, and primer and pre-primer levels”.

“We do not have the luxury, forgive me for saying this, of experimenting with so-called progressive methods in education,” Ms Baston said. “We desperately need, in the words of Professor (Samuel) McDaniel … the three Rs, reading, writing and sums (’rithmetic).”

She added: “I am appalled that after decades of this university’s advocacy for taking seriously our children’s first language as we attempt to teach English, that no such course on dual- language teaching exists in teachers’ colleges.”

Two and half years ago, in a discussion on the Patterson Commission’s report on education transformation, Ms Baston made a similar observation, saying: “We continue to ignore that profoundly alienating and disenfranchising effort of not recognising that most of our children from poorer homes have a first language which is not Standard English…[T]he failure to take this reality seriously (and) to draw on the research done by our linguistic scholars at the UWI and to have teachers trained in the ability to engage students in their first language and then, through that language, to introduce to Standard English, is an injustice.”

This debate of teaching by formally recognising Patois and teaching English as a compulsory second language has been ongoing for decades, on which Jamaican governments have been ambivalent or flipped-flopped. Largely, Patois, with respect to official attention, is treated as a cultural curiosity, venerated in festivals.

On its face, the ideas around language in education, as espoused by Ms Baston and people of like mind, seems to have a perfect fit in the Holy Trinity experiment, which has received the imprimatur of the education minister, Dana Morris Dixon. Is that, indeed, the case?