Educators test new pathway for high schoolers
Published:Monday | February 17, 2025 | 10:22 AMErica Virtue/Senior Gleaner Writer
Renowned educator Grace Baston, a former principal of Campion College, is leading the charge to transform 99.6 per cent of the grade-seven cohort at Holy Trinity High School, moving them from non-readers and well below grade level readers to reading at grade level and further by the end of the 2024-2025 academic year.
Baston, along with Faith Alexander, former head of the Transformation Unit at the Ministry of Education and Youth, embarked on the programme which will, in effect, reverse the Pathways Programme to have it begin at the front end of the secondary school experience rather than at the end. At the end, the programme sees students remaining in school until age 20.
Baston and Alexander believe the Pathways experiment should begin at entry to high school. The programme, which began last October, is already reaping success in the 10 weeks it has been operational.
The Gleaner understands it is also being supported by the Ministry of Education, the Catholic church, E-Learning Jamaica, as well as private sector entities and individuals.
Other stakeholders are keenly watching the progress so it can be modelled elsewhere, and plans are under way for it to start at Newell High School in St Elizabeth.
Baston, in an interview with The Gleaner, outlined its genesis.
“I’ve been at the end of the system where I’m working with the brightest, and even if they’re not the most privileged, because 30 per cent of those kids from Campion are coming from primary school. A lot of people think, if you go to Campion, they’re rich, no. Seventy per cent of them are middle and upper middle class, but a good solid 30 per cent are just working class people whose children are bright. So that’s where I’ve been for 18 years and before that I was at Alpha,” she explained, adding her distaste for the “real apartheid that we have in education”.
Baston, along with Alexander and other educators with similar interests, held discussions and it led to devising a plan that would ultimately reduce the deficits of literacy and numeracy in the system. After retirement, she became part of the executive at St Michael’s College, where former Education Minister Ronald Thwaites also served. The transformation talks took shape with Alexander’s input and, along with Thwaites, the project was created.
“Thwaites approached the ministry and presented the idea. He told them he was working with Holy Trinity and told them the demographic ... . Of the 200 children they took in, in 2023, only two or three were reading above grade six or grade five. The majority of those children were reading below grade four, grade three, grade two, and a solid third of them were reading around grade one to pre-primary,” Baston disclosed.
Thwaites asked the ministry to allow some flexibility to discard the existing timetable and curriculum to focus on the programme’s three objectives of literacy, numeracy and character formation. It would use software that was used and worked in Mississippi. The concept, she said, found favour with Alexander, as the chief transformation officer at the education ministry, who volunteered to write a curriculum.
Similar demographics
Alexander told The Gleaner the basis for adopting the Mississippi model in the island.
“It worked in Louisiana for years. Not only with the implementation, but the conceptualisation of their programme. I know that programme like the back of my hand, but my reason for wanting to use this model in Jamaica is because we have similar demographics as Mississippi in terms of poverty and where the children are, struggling with literacy and numeracy,” she said.
According to her, Mississippi was the 49th poorest of the 50 states in the United States. Its children are similar to Jamaica’s, and reading well below grade level.
“These are grade-four kids. And so the governor at the time decided that they had to do something radical so they could not continue ... . Because the children are poor doesn’t mean they can’t learn,” she said.
“They did three things. One, they used the science of reading framework. They put a bunch of money into professional development. And they also enacted some laws, one of which was mandatory retention in the third grade. So, if the kids took the grade-three state exam and couldn’t pass it, then they had to be retained …” Alexander told The Gleaner.
“When I was in the ministry I was the chief transformation officer. I mentioned the issue of the mandatory retention but they wouldn’t hear of it. It took an act of the United States Congress to change that, so they weren’t really amenable to implementing that strategy. So, what we’re doing at Holy Trinity is, instead of doing the sixth form or 12th and 13th grade, we put that on to the grade seven so the kids will leave in the, what is it, 11th grade … . Just like how we scaled back the number of subjects that the students are taking because, if they can’t read, why are they taking 14 subjects,” she queried.
Continuing, she said, “When the baseline assessment was done, only three out of 203 were able to read. When we did the math baseline, I did the assessment at a grade six because they just finished PEP (Primary Exit Profile). I crafted the assessment at a grade-six level and one of the questions was to write 850 in standard form. Nobody could do it because they could not read the instructions. I had to then redo the assessment at a fourth-grade level. And 78 per cent of the children were below non-mastery at the fourth-grade level.
The education ministry, Baston said, allowed the school to hire in vacancies which already existed, and class size under the programme was no more than 20 children. Teachers were dedicated to the programme and not teaching all over the school. Students had language and math teachers every day for an hour and tech practice every day for 40 minutes.
“The software we’re using is called Fast Forward which has a lot of literacy focus. Even though we are doing things in numeracy, the literacy is really where we’ve put out the ambitious goal of getting 75 per cent of them reading at least at grade six in a year. So that’s why I’m so laser focused on that. The software has a built in programme called a reading progress indicator,” she explained.
Describing the function, she said, the reading progress indicator provides a diagnosis, and it’s a self-assessment software which scored and placed every child at their reading level. It is also adaptive and knows each child, and gives lessons needed based on its initial assessment. It creates lessons for each child, and, according to her, each child may be doing something different. Using games, they are developing sequencing, phonemic awareness and sounds.
“The reading progress indicator assigns them a score, but it stops at grade one. So, every single day I can see when a child goes on. I know how long he/she stayed and I can see which of the exercises is completed and I can see progress,” she explained, adding that the teacher gets daily feedback.
Scheduled to start last August, it was pushed back to October after adjustments to school scheduling and time-table provisions clashed with the teacher training. She describes the programme as a planner, evaluator and a provider with supervising teachers who make sure every child is on task. She said E-Learning provided the machines, while Gordon Swaby of EduFocal used his own money and provided them with bandwidth to have between 60 and 90 children on the computers at one time.
Results ‘really encouraging’
Called the “grade-seven academy”, she believes the deficit is so great that it should be for two years. Since it became operational, and with evidence of success, for their own validation, she has children reading in front of her using the government’s assessment programme to validate the ranking provided. For every 40 children assessed, she said, 30 have moved a reading or year level above initial assessment.
“The results are really encouraging. It is inspiring. There was a little girl who, when she came, she was already reading at grade five. She was not a non-reader. But when she read for me the other day, I said, ‘Child, you could read the grade-eight text. You’re amazing.’ And she started to cry. I said, ‘What are you crying for her?’ And she said when she was in primary school, ‘I was dunce’,” she disclosed.
The language arts curriculum at Holy Trinity is at fifth-grade level and math at fourth-grade level. At Newell, the maths curriculum is at second-grade level, having two strands, listening comprehension and oral responses for both literacy and maths.
For Thwaites, operation rescue is a must. He said the Newell exercise began when the school’s board chairman, Jason Henzell, found out what was being done at Holy Trinity. He has been putting things in place for the programme to start there.
“The cohort at Newell was worse than Holy Trinity. I am sure this could be replicated in many schools. We cannot continue like this. We’ve received tremendous support from the private sector, we always need more. But teachers have to be specially sensitive and we have chosen people with the knowledge of pedagogy but with the heart for the children,” he said.
Although success is being reaped, the former minister said a small minority has not made any progress and counselling services have been engaged. Currently Baston is responsible for operations and Alexander is in charge of the curriculum. Many children, she said, have learning disabilities and have not been assessed.