Lipton Matthews | Preserve elitism of traditional high schools

Jamaica has immense potential to achieve greatness. But unlike other great countries, this island was never blessed with an enlightened intellectual class. If politicians and their cronies in academia were not consistently derailing the country with foolish projects, we would be the pearl of the Caribbean. These busybodies possess an insatiable appetite for experimenting, and now they have decided that not even education should be spared in their quest for social engineering.

To many policymakers, traditional high schools represent the last bastion of elitism to be toppled. Instead of implementing policies to ensure that less prestigious schools can improve outcomes, they would rather complain that elite institutions are maintaining an apartheid system in education.

A recent report from the Ministry of Education noted that the ministry will be requesting top-performing high schools to reserve spaces for students who perform poorly in the upcoming Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examinations.

Dr Kasan Troupe, the acting chief education officer, apparently thinks that this is a good idea: “Not only should the brightest of the brightest be reserved for the 35 traditional high schools. If the best resources are there, then the students who need it should have access to it, and our high school principals have said to us ... we will take a class set or two.”

Such thinking indicates that performance will automatically improve if schools are given adequate resources. However, there is no conclusive evidence in the literature of a positive relationship between school resources and student performance (Hanushek, 1997).

On the other hand, research has shown that teacher quality is a major determinant of performance. We are aware that many Jamaican teachers are untrained in their field of instruction. Therefore, it would be wise to ensure that all teachers are sufficiently trained to impart knowledge.

In addition, the National College for Educational Leadership must place a greater focus on training middle managers and specialist teachers. Also, the infrastructure of many upgraded high schools has been improved over the years, so the resource gap may no longer be a big issue.

The crux of the matter is that students from predominantly stable backgrounds tend to attend high-performing schools. In contrast to their poor-performing counterparts, prestigious high schools also have a culture of achievement. For example, at some high schools, misguided students may not regard truancy as a big deal, whereas at another high school, pupils purchase books that are not on the recommended list, because they want an advantage. The latter example was not unusual during my time in high school.

Conversely, however, Minister of Education Karl Samuda thinks that exposing poor-performing students to a superior environment will close the disparity in education: “My little way of trying to address it is by simply exposing those who are from depressed areas of Jamaica, who, when you look at their results, they are bunched together, in an institution that has not had a history of performance, because there is no space in the inn for them.”

Placing poor performers in a better environment without changing their culture will not encourage them to perform. Equipping subpar schools with behaviour modification specialists would be a prudent idea. The former idea could result in the ruination of good schools by mediocre students from volatile areas.

Our traditional high schools are institutions to be preserved and should not be sacrificed on the altar of equality. Additionally, if sensible people wanted their children to become familiar with the coarse culture evident in some areas, then their children would be attending those institutions.

The recommendations of the Ministry of Education are silly and must be rejected by all rational Jamaicans.

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