Ronald Thwaites | Priorities and choices

Every Jamaican, and especially every parent, should express strong support for the principled stand being taken by oversight Minister Karl Samuda in enjoining that all persons being appointed to the sensitive and crucial post of school principal must have been exposed to the offering of the National College of Educational Leadership (NCEL) or its equivalent.

To give up on that is to condemn the education system to the haphazard and most often inadequate training of potential school managers. Promotion by seniority, friendship and ‘contacts’ can’t cut it anymore. As we see plainly right now, deficiencies at the cusp of school leadership contribute to poor outcomes and, ultimately, undermine national development. It is that serious.

So the attack on NCEL by the president of the increasingly reactionary Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) must be rejected. With all the challenges facing education and training, it is bewildering that he should have chosen this issue as some beating horse for his presidency. We really should not expect important institutional leaders who, in Neville Martin’s memorable words, “nuh love progress”. Where is his comparable concern for the illiterates we are graduating, the hunger of school youth, and the depressing salary deal being given to our best teachers?

Of course, there must be improvements to NCEL. The minister assures me that a monitoring board will be established and the curriculum constantly reviewed to ensure relevance. The institution was set up to enhance the capacities of principals in the areas of financial management, human resources, and superb pedagogy. Which professional should resist further learning and capacity building?

In its history, under the leadership of the great Mills, Hawthorne, Dalton-James, Powell, Miller and many others, that is the role played by the Jamaica Teachers’ Association. Not so under the present leadership, when the narrow and ineffective (look at the pay package!) role of a trade union has swamped the transformational cause of professional excellence.

Ideally, it would have been for the JTA , along with the universities, to have led the delivery of professional qualifications for principals with such rigour, comprehensiveness and accountability as to secure the imprimatur of government and country.

BACKWARD THINKING

In short, the whingeing about NCEL by the JTA is an instance of backward thinking, and strident and often ill-tempered unwillingness to collaborate with Government and accept change to the benefit of the nation’s children. It disgraces their illustrious pedigree.

A similar instance occurred in Parliament last Tuesday, when a challenge was made to the finance minister not to cut the School Feeding Programme by almost $200 million, but rather to comprehensively increase funding to this vital body in aid of education and crime-fighting. Dr Clarke places social programmes like school breakfasts and lunches, needed by perhaps 300,000 of our children, in the realm of social spending, only possible after the deadweight of an unreformed public sector has been satisfied.

Yes, the Government is to be credited for progresssively improving the school-feeding budget (during Minister Reid’s tenure), but nowhere near the amount needed to ensure effective attention in class, and prevent absenteeism and dropout incidence. We are making some wrong choices with what we do with our tax dollars.

What was disappointing was the absence of support from other members of parliament, all of whom have to confront, on a daily basis, the reality of inadequately nourished schoolchildren begging them for food money.

The government members are in denial of increasing poverty; masters of jeering, silence and cheerleading, while most of the elected from the Opposition, still navel-gazing, didn’t bother to come or to stay, and seemed contented, uncritically, with the exception of Mark Golding, to let the administration have its way with a $50-billion supplementary expenditure.

In the end, the only real opportunity for a mid-Budget year evaluation of the nation’s finances – the profoundly spiritual amd material choices of how we allocate the resources God has provided us – was foregone.

Ronald Thwaites is member of parliament for Kingston Central and a former education minister. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.