Editorial | Dr Smith’s JTA

The Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) has a peculiar leadership structure.

It elects its next president a year ahead of time, just ahead of the inauguration of the person who will lead the organisation during the president-elect’s waiting period. In fact, their governance arrangements formally recognises the sitting president, the president-elect and the immediate past president as a kind of triumvirate at the helm of the organisation.

Our point is that Mark Smith, who was this week sworn in as president of the teachers’ union, has had a long time to think about the kind of JTA he wants to lead.

A year ago, we suggested to Dr Smith that his mission must be to transition the JTA to an “organisation of thought, ideas and educational leadership”.

Rather, that was the suggestion we made to his predecessor, Leighton Johnson, but urged Dr Smith, the principal of Munro College, a 168-year-old boys’ high school in Jamaica’s southwestern parish of St Elizabeth, to also adopt when his turn came.

We can’t claim that Mr Johnson grasped the idea of the JTA as an organisation of transformational leadership. Nonetheless, the issue remains as relevant today as it was in August, 2023.

DEEP CRISIS

Indeed, Jamaica’s education system continues to face a deep crisis.

Each year, a third of the 12-year-olds at grade six complete their primary education without meeting the basic competence requirements in language arts. They struggled to read and write, as well as with age and grade-appropriate comprehension in English.

Further, 40 per cent of the same cohort, or over 14,000 children, fail to meet the standards for competence in mathematics.

On average, up to seven per cent of these students perform so poorly in English and maths that they are deemed to be at beginners’ levels, thus requiring major interventions to be ready for the basics of high-school education.

The problem persists in high school where nearly seven in 10 students leave without external certification and fewer than 30 per cent of those who sit the Caribbean Examination Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate tests pass five subjects, inclusive of maths and English, in a single sitting. Only 27 per cent of the age cohort are enrolled in tertiary institutions.

At the same time, hundreds of the island’s best teachers leave the classrooms each year for better-paying jobs abroad, including, recently, in China and the Middle East.

These are among challenges for which many stakeholders look to the JTA for solutions and strong leadership, rather than its posturing as a trade union. It is often found wanting.

This newspaper hopes for a new and different kind of engagement from Dr Smith.

We were mildly encouraged by his inaugural address at the JTA’s annual conference, but now look forward to deeper, more robust analyses on issues such as the ranking of schools, salaries, teacher accountability and performance.

For instance, the JTA president might have a point, as he argued in his speech, that the society was now too “obsessed with ranking systems” for schools rather than paying attention to what is in the best interest of students.

“The time has come for us to lean towards a more inclusionary model of education that validates the multiplicity of talents and abilities of our children,” Dr Smith said.

That, on its face, is a sound proposition.

PERFORMANCE-BASED COMPENSATION

There are questions, though, of whether facilitating various talents and learning abilities of students, and robust assessments and comparisons of the outputs of categories schools are mutually exclusive matters. They seem not, to The Gleaner.

Jamaican teachers, perhaps understandably, have had a long-standing antipathy to school performance league tables, concerned that they might be unfairly used to judge their work and to establish performance-based compensation schemes.

Some of their reasons are valid.

In an unequal society, with a similarly skewed education system, a minority of schools, the so-called traditional high schools, especially, receive students with best grades. Generally, they have parents who can better afford to support the institutions economically.

These elements are good predictors of education outcomes.

It is in that context that the Patterson Commission on transforming the education system proposed, in its report released more than two years ago, rankings systems other than those based on results in terminal exams.

For instance, a value-added ranking system that addresses issues, such as the socio-economic background and the performance of students and time of their entry of the institutions help determine the value a school might, or might not, have contributed to its students. These value-added rankings, the Patterson commission suggested, would work alongside performance in terminal exams and the analysis of the management of schools by the government schools inspectorate.

Criteria such as these could help, in addition to other management and performance reviews, compensation support arrangements based on real deliverables.

The question of ranking isn’t, by far, the only matter raised addressed by the Patterson Report, which unfortunately, hasn’t been subjected to the robust debate and analysis for which this newspaper has encouraged.

It is still not too late. If Dr Smith’s JTA takes up the mantle as Jamaica’s thought leader in education, it can lead the charge.