Editorial | Focus on reading, JTA

Jamaicans concerned with the state of the island’s education system will welcome Mark Smith’s latest intervention into the debate on the issue, hoping it marks the start of a serious and sustained effort by the teachers’ union to the crisis, or clear directions thereto.

If that is indeed the intention, as a first step, Dr Smith and the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), which he leads, should orchestrate the long hoped-for public engagement and analysis of the Orlando Patterson Commission report on the transformation of the island’s education arrangements, including, as a matter of urgency, specific fixes to the catastrophe at the primary level.

They should also place on the table proposals for shifting more of the Government’s annual spending on education from administration to efforts that more directly impact what effects in the classroom and educational outcomes.

The Gleaner would also suggest to Dr Smith that in his critiquing the education system he avoids labels and phrases like ‘colonisers’ and ‘colonial’ as descriptors for the existing models, which might be taken as suggesting as absence of agency of the people who have managed it, and, more significantly, has the risk of alienating folks who might be inclined to transformation.

Last month, Mark Smith was installed as the president of the JTA, which performs the dual roles as the professional organisation and trade union for more than 25,000 government-paid teachers. He immediately addressed the question of the affordability of teacher training, and what teachers are paid upon graduating if the government hoped to stanch the haemorrhage from the island’s classrooms to jobs abroad.

ATTACKED THE STRUCTURE

Last week, in a speech to the Rotary Club of New Kingston, Dr Smith attacked the structure of an education system in which large swathes of students underachieve, while a relative few perform at a high level.

Although around five per cent of GDP, Jamaica spends more on education than most of its regional peers, whilethe return on that expenditure lags behind Caribbean comparators. A third of the children complete their primary education largely illiterate; over 40 per cent do not achieve grade-level (grade six) mastery in mathematics.

Approximately 70 per cent of students complete regular high school (grade 11) without certification. And of the students who write the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams in 2024, a mere 33 per cent were successful at maths and 36 per cent failed English. And only 17 per cent of the students who passed five subjects in a single sitting had English and maths among those subjects. Further, fewer than three in 10 (27 per cent) Jamaicans of the appropriate age cohort are enrolled in some form of tertiary education programme.

In his speech last week, Dr Smith, a high school principal, suggested that the education system has not changed fundamentally from the colonial period, and called for a rebalancing of education priorities “to cultivate a more supportive, inclusive and empowering Jamaican society”.

That included, he suggested, new approaches to allocating resources, so that so much does not go to the education bureaucracy.

“That money is not to fuel the great bureaucracy of government and the Ministry of Education, but to ensure that it gets down to the grassroots, it gets down to the ground where you have a teacher standing face to face with a student,” he said.

For the current fiscal year, the Government allocated $160 billion for recurrent spending in education; over eight per cent of this, or more than $13 billion, will go to administration. Twenty-one per cent of the administration expenditure is for “executive direction”.

RECOMMENDED TO BE OVERHAULED

Most of these functions are at the central education ministry, which the Patterson Commission, like the Rae Davis Task Force two decades earlier, recommended to be overhauled. Much of its administrative functions should be given to its regional offices, once they are appropriately equipped to take on the jobs they were supposed to do.

The Government appointed a committee to oversee the implementation of the Patterson recommendations. The education minister has reported that the implementation work is largely on track.

However, given the absence of robust public discourse on, or analysis of, the report (which was delivered more than two years ago), there is no real clarity on whether what has been prioritised are the most deserving of urgent emphasis.

The JTA, under Dr Smith’s leadership, will hopefully take a lead on this.

In his Rotary Club speech, Dr Smith also said, “We talk a lot about differentiation and different pathways, but at the end of the day, if we can fundamentally fix what happens on the primary level, I think we can negate a lot of the issues we are facing.”

This newspaper agrees fully.

Indeed, The Gleaner has called for a reset of the mission of the island’s primary schools to prioritise the delivery of literate and numerate children. In other words, every child who completes grade six (age 12) must be able to read and do sums at his or her grade level.

As part of this process (which must be enshrined in the Education Code, thereby having the force of law) the system by which students are automatically promoted from grade to grade must end.

This system must be supported by a battery of reading specialists and other support staff, including at the earliest grades, to ensure that no child falls in the cracks. No pedagogic system or teaching technique should be spared in aid of early grade literacy.

If a child cannot read in the language of educational instruction, he or she is unlikely to learn anything taught in that language at any level.

Now that Dr Smith has signed on the fact that the primary system needs urgent attention, perhaps the JTA will lead the campaign on the reading question.