Editorial | The mission is reading

As she contemplates solutions to Jamaica’s crisis of poor educational outcomes, the new portfolio minister, Dana Morris Dixon, would benefit from the insights of Grace Baston, former principal of Campion College, Jamaica’s most successful high schools measured by examination results.

Dr Morris Dixon would therefore find it useful to review Ms Baston’s recent remarks at the annual awards ceremony for students at the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.

Ms Baston supported the idea that the critical mission of primary schools should be the effective delivery of the basics of reading and maths, and reprised her previous argument that the mother tongue of the majority of children is not English, but Jamaican Patois, and should therefore be taught accordingly. In that regard, dual-language teaching should be part of the educational process.

Before the critics twist themselves into knots, Ms Baston did not claim that all Jamaicans ought not to have a firm command of English. And nor did she recommend its displacement by Patois.

Rather, she called for an acceptance of a historic, social and cultural reality, lest Jamaica perpetuate and deepen its crisis.

‘BARELY LITERATE’

The basic data on the crisis in the primary education system are well-known. Each year, around a third of the students complete their primary education, at grade six, as Ms Baston put it, “barely literate”, having not met proficiency standards in language arts. Forty per cent fall short in maths.

In 40 high schools, Ms Baston pointed out, most of the grade-seven students read“at grade three, grade two, grade one, and primer and pre-primer levels”.

She did not identify these schools. It is safe to assume that these schools are located in poor inner-city and rural communities and that most of their students come from disadvantaged social backgrounds.

“We do not have the luxury, forgive me for saying this, of experimenting with so-called progressive methods in education,” Ms Baston said. “We desperately need, in the words of Professor (Samuel) McDaniel s– and I hear there was another article this week – the three Rs, reading, writing and sums (’rithmetic).”

Dr McDaniel teaches mathematics at The UWI and Ms Baston’s reference was to his remarks earlier this year – when only 33 per cent of Jamaican students achieved passing grades in mathematics in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams – that a significant problem with maths was a problem of reading and comprehension in English.

“If you cannot read properly, then it is almost impossible to do math,” he said. Concepts are difficult to grasp.

Indeed, the English deficit of most students entering grade seven continues throughout high school, manifesting in the fact that approximately a quarter (23.6 per cent in 2024) of Jamaica students fail at English in the CSEC exams. Further, this year only 14 per cent of the students passed five subjects, inclusive of English and maths, in a single sitting. That is a combination considered the minimum for matriculation to university education, or decent jobs.

THE MISSION OF PRIMARY SCHOOLS

It is against this backdrop that The Gleaner has advocated that in this period of crisis, the mission of primary schools, whatever else they do, must be to ensure that no student leaves the system unable to read or comprehend, or do sums at his or his age and grade levels. This must be anchored in legislation, including the education code, which is now being revised.

Inevitably, it must also mean an end to the automatic promotion of students, notwithstanding their capacities in reading, comprehension and arithmetic. This approach must be underpinned by the introduction, at scale, of new teaching techniques in reading, comprehension and doing sums.

Then there is the other critical factor that was highlighted by Ms Baston: the need for the society’s acceptance of its genuinely bilingual self and, for the education establishment, an approach to teaching that does not disenfranchise the majority whose mother tongue is not instinctively the language of education instruction.

“I am appalled that after decades of this university’s advocacy for taking seriously our children’s first language as we attempt to teach English, that no such course on dual- language teaching exists in teachers’ colleges,” Ms Baston said.

The statistics on Jamaica’s education say that her consternation is not misplaced.

And neither is her outrage that the society continuing “to measure our children’s intelligence in tests in a language that they do not speak is an injustice”.

“And to continue to promote them year after year and then graduate them from high school with … no skills in numeracy and literacy is a mortal sin,” she said.

The Gleaner concurs.

Dr Dixon Morris has an opportunity to be the difference.

 

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Celebrating excellence

The Gleaner is profoundly grateful to Grace Batson, the former principal of the Roman Catholic high school, Campion College, and chairman of the election watchdog, Citizens’ Action for Free and Fair Elections (CAFFE), for bringing to this newspaper’s and public’s attention what, otherwise, would have been two recent, uncommented-on episodes of “excellence”.

Both have special resonance because they involve young people in spheres and circumstances cynics might deem unfathomable.

One has to do with CAFFE’s role in observing last February’s municipal elections. What, hitherto, was not widely known is that CAFFE recruited and deployed 400 students from 31 high schools in that exercise.

We agree with Ms Batson that this demonstration of social consciousness by the students was a priceless act of excellence.

Then there was the young Campion pure maths teacher, with a recently completed degree in actuarial science, all of whose 70 pure maths candidates in the CAPE 1 exams passed the subject. Sixty-eight, 97 per cent, received grade one passes, and two received grade two.

That unnamed young man might have pursued a career in the actuarial field, and yet might.

But, as he told Ms Baston, a teacher at St Jago High School imbued him with a passion for mathematics. He wanted to do the same with other students.

That statement was at once a declaration both commitment and of beauty, of a kind that Jamaica should cherish whether that young man ultimately stays in the classroom or moves on.