Editorial | Reading, writing, sums

This newspaper previously set out a list of priorities for the new education minister, Dana Morris Dixon, to pursue during the early period of her tenure.

We, however, unwittingly omitted a fourth issue, which should be linked to our suggestion for a (re)launch of the Patterson Commission’s report on transforming Jamaica’s education system, which must include a massive programme of public education about the report’s contents, and to gain national consensus on what from it should be urgently implemented.

We refer to the draft education regulations, which, apparently, have been ready for more than a year and quietly made the rounds among education professionals, and some stakeholders, for their comments. These regulations provide nuts and bolts guidance for the operation of the Education Act, such as defining centres of power in the system, the rights and legitimate expectations of participants therein, and the goals and priorities of the education process.

Regrettably, the draft update of the existing document, which was last substantially revised in 1980, has not been in the wider public domain to allow for input from a wider group of people. These include the parents and guardians of school goers, civil society groups and the private sector – all of whom are impacted by how the education system is managed and the outcomes thereof.

So, the document must now be urgently tabled in Parliament by Dr Morris Dixon, with a recommendation that it be immediately referred to a joint select committee of the House and Senate for review and public hearings.

But while we propose this route as well as appreciate that many of the proposals contained in the draft regulations are derived from the Patterson Report, even a cursory review of the document reveals the absence of a critical, and urgently required, declaration of principle – a charter of sorts – for addressing the immediate crisis in education.

UNDERLYING PROBLEM

The underlying problem, leading Jamaica’s poor education performance is obvious: it is the inability of children to read and comprehend proficiently in the language of instruction. Which is English, and not the first language of the majority of children, who primarily speak Jamaican or patois.

Each year, upwards of a third of students complete their primary education, at grade six, without meeting the proficiency standard for Language Arts. Put crudely, many of these 11 and 12-year-olds are, if not illiterate, struggle with literacy. Additionally, 40 per cent of students don’t meet the proficiency standard in mathematics.

On average, seven per cent perform so poorly in these subjects that they need deep and rigorous interventions to meet the basic requirements for secondary education.

This poor starting point sets the foundation for failure later on in high school. In the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams this year, nearly a quarter (23.6 per cent) failed the English test, while 77 per cent failed maths.

Only 14 per cent of the over 31,000 who sat the exams passed five subjects, with English and maths being among them. Indeed, passing five CSEC subjects, including English and maths, is considered a base matriculation requirement for higher education or good jobs in the labour market.

Another marker of Jamaica’s education performance is a finding by the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, indicating that Jamaican students, who completed 11.7 years of schooling, received 7.2 years of learning when compared to top-performing countries. In other words, there is a learning gap of 4.5 years by Jamaican students.

FIXING PROBLEMS

Fixing problems in the early childhood sector is a critical longer-term solution to the crisis, which must be done. But there is an immediate emergency that must be dealt with now!

In that regard, the fundamental mission of Jamaica’s primary schools, whatever else they do, must be that no student will complete his or her education at that level without being able to read and comprehend and to do sums at their age and grade level. This regime will, perforce, mean an end to the practice of the automatic classroom escalator: students being promoted from form to form each year, notwithstanding that they can’t read, write, add, subtract or multiply at their grade levels.

The education regulations must insist that this ends, as well as provide the basis for intervention mechanisms including new and creative approaches to pedagogy for students who lag.

Put differently, Jamaica must legislate against illiteracy and innumeracy, on the understanding that a child’s ability to read and comprehend in the language she or he is being taught in is foundational to formal education.

There are other issues, too, that will demand scrutiny in the draft regulations, including the mechanisms for funding schools and the allocation of power in the education system. For instance, while this newspaper, like the Patterson Commission, believes that the education minister needs the authority to intervene in failing schools as well as to set the national education agenda, we are wary of, and warn against, an over-centralisation of power in the administrative centre, at the expense of initiative and creativity by the leadership and governors of schools. There has to be a balance, set with clarity, between these two imperatives, without sacrificing accountability.

Consideration of these governance issues must also mean a review of the structure of the central ministry, where, as the Patterson Commission noted, most of money allocated for its operation “relate to compensation, with smaller amounts available for programmatic activities”.