Primary schools must be the minister’s top priority

The new minister of education, Dr Dana Morris Dixon, faces the immense challenge of reforming Jamaica's education system, starting with the critical primary level. With nearly a third of students leaving grade six unable to read or perform basic math, Dr Morris Dixon must focus her efforts on ensuring no child advances without mastering these foundational skills. This will require urgent reforms to end automatic grade promotions, allocate essential resources, and enforce stricter educational standards. Addressing these issues is vital to reversing the learning crisis that spills into high schools and beyond.

Dana needs a deputy

Jamaica Gleaner/13 Nov 2024

NO ONE questions Dana Morris Dixon’s competence, organisational abilities or, as people who have worked with her say, her capacity for sustained effort.

Yet, there is little doubt that Dr Morris Dixon is in charge of one of the largest and most complex portfolios in the government, including matters, especially in education, that will require detailed and concentrated attention if she is to be really transformational.

In other words, the new Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information – she also has responsibility for digital transformation – is in for a difficult slog. Even with her best efforts, Dr Morris Dixon will, without help, likely find her workload just too heavy and complex for her to have the best shot at success.

That is why The Gleaner urges Prime Minister Andrew Holness to appoint an energetic and competent junior minister to the portfolio, to whom Dr Morris Dixon can assign specific jobs while she remains in overall charge.

We insist on such an arrangement, even if Mr Holness may consider the current scheme as merely a holding position – in place until after the general election, constitutionally due, at an outside, in a year.

For not only are all the subjects in Dr Morris Dixon’s portfolio critical, the crises in the education sector, in particular the primary system, are so acute that addressing them is impatient of delay.

Indeed, that is the segment of her portfolio that Dr Morris Dixon must directly oversee, and to which she must bring all the authority of her office and the confidence which Prime Minister Holness clearly reposes in her.

REPUTATION FOR GETTING THINGS DONE

Dr Morris Dixon joined the government 17 months ago from the private sector, where she was a senior executive at the financial group, Jamaica National (JN). She has a reputation for getting things done.

In government, she was minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), with oversight for skills and digital transformation, including the rollout of the National Identification System (NIDS).

Information was added to her portfolio after the governing Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) less than stellar performance in last February’s municipal elections, which led to Prime Minister Holness taking the job from Robert Morgan, who was then a minister at the OPM. Mr Morgan was assigned to the Ministry of Job Creation and Economic Growth as one of its ministers.

Notably, prior to being moved to the prime minister’s office, Mr Morgan was a junior minister in the education and youth ministry, which then also had responsibility for information. Although that ministry lost the information portfolio, which Morgan took with him to the OPM, he was replaced by the recently resigned Marsha Smith, who was put in charge of youth.

The point is, in a portfolio without the breadth of the one being carried by Dr Morris Dixon, Prime Minister Holness apparently considered education and youth sufficiently onerous for the senior minister, Fayval Williams, to require a junior.

At the start of this month, when Ms Williams was transferred to the finance ministry (after Nigel Clarke’s resignation to become a deputy managing director at the IMF), Dr Morris Dixon wasn’t given a deputy.

NATURAL FITS

To be clear, this newspaper believes that, except perhaps for information, Dr Morris Dixon’s previous assignments are natural fits with the education portfolio, and are in sync with her skill sets.

Indeed, vocational training, overseen by the HEART/NSTA Trust training agency, should long since have been seamlessly integrated into the national education system under a single minister. Further, digital transformation is as important to the education sector as it is to the wider economy.

In the event, Dr Morris Dixon is in a good place to ensure the application of technology in aid of improved educational outcomes.

In all of this, the minister’s most urgent priority must be a reorientation of the fundamental mission of the island’s primary schools. Whatever else they do, the key job of these schools, at this time, must be that no child completes her or his primary education at grade six unable to read, comprehend and do sums in the language of instruction at their age and grade levels.

This must be prescribed in law, particularly the Education Code (which is now under review) and underpinned by ending the system of promoting children from form to form each year, no matter how poorly they read or do sums.

The government must find, and allocate, all necessary resources to this enterprise.

Why is all this important?

On average, each year a third of Jamaican children complete primary education either illiterate or barely literate. Forty per cent don’t meet the basic standard in mathematics.

Children who can’t read and comprehend in the language of instruction are unlikely to learn much else.

Thus, the learning deficit spills over into high school, from which nearly 70 per cent of students leave, after five years, without formal certification.

Moreover, of the Jamaican students who sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, nearly a quarter fail at English and two-thirds in maths. This year, only 14 per cent of those students pass five subjects, including English and maths (which is considered the basic for matriculation to higher education) in a single sitting.

Dr Morris Dixon’s priority is therefore clear. It is to ensure that primary students can read, comprehend and do sums. It must happen now!

That will demand major concentration and will, and pushing against entrenched interests.

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