Gordon Robinson | Stop quarreling about numbers and develop a vision for education

The current Premier League Political Football game is all about teacher migration.

Government has carried the ball up field rapidly from (paraphrase) “a no nutten. It happen every year” to PM’s latest description as “a threat to our ability to deliver quality education”. Fayval says teacher migration is perennial. She’s right, but it gets worse annually, and 2022 is the worst ever. But every adversity offers opportunity. This is our chance to reconstruct teacher training for higher-quality graduates and pay teachers accordingly. Qualified teachers should be the highest-paid public servants.

Political leaders have postponed the much-needed education revolution for decades, preferring to continue a numbers debate featuring the size of education’s annual budgetary allocation. But as Orlando Patterson’s Commission pointed out, it’s not how much you spend, it’s WHERE you spend it. I promise you, overseas recruiters are NOT employing unqualified teachers. That’s our thing. So the solution hasn’t changed because I-don’t-care-how-many are exposing government neglect by abandoning their local teacher jobs this year. The only real change is the egg of gross neglect (for the maths fans, that’s 144 times worse than normal neglect) splattered all over governments’ faces.

The vision (something politicians prefer to avoid) MUST be to produce a system of education manned (politically incorrect, I know) by highly qualified teachers (preferably at a minimum of a master’s degree) who are encouraged to stay by becoming Jamaica’s highest-paid public servants with tax-free perks to include government housing. If we handed out some free houses to teachers (or provided rent-free accommodation), then in the near future, we might not have to hand out so many to the “poor and vulnerable”.

If we don’t begin the journey to realising this vision TODAY with one small step, we’ll only exacerbate the current crisis and make the journey that much longer.

Everybody knows I support the new Jamaica Teacher Council Bill big time. But we also need a new mindset in Government that understands that legislation alone solves nothing. Jamaica needs the political will to begin the urgently needed teacher-training process NOW. Import qualified teacher trainers if you must. We need properly trained teachers attuned to 21st-century requirements and able to educate for life more than we need construction workers. Teachers are the most important citizens, even in the most egalitarian of societies, and it is past time we acknowledge this and then DO something about it.

THE REAL CRISIS

I repeat. Overseas recruiters are NOT employing unqualified teachers. If Jamaica wants to cauterise the immediate bleeding, then it must immediately offer highly qualified teachers compensation packages that could lure them from non-teaching jobs or keep them in Jamaica. Stop the stupid, desperate-sounding allegations of lack of patriotism. Jamaicans from ALL areas of life have migrated for better opportunities from before the days of Windrush. This has NOTHING to do with patriotism. It’s simply yet another example of Goodman’s Law. Don’t ask if it’s about the money. It’s ALWAYS about the money. You can’t say your ideology is market driven and then insist your citizens take anti-market decisions. That’s plain stupid.

But once again, a myopic Opposition has been lured by the Government into a mathematics debate when the Opposition should be focused on education and proposing solutions to our education crisis. Jamaica does NOT have a teacher -migration crisis. It has a Teacher crisis. It has an Education crisis. Schools are not buildings. Schools are teachers who need facilities AND incentives to be able to guide and develop our most precious asset: our children.

While Government and Opposition fight over what 900-167 equals or whether the numbers in that equation are accurate, Jamaica’s children continue to be undereducated in schools with outdated curricula; underqualified teachers; and in a system that discourages teacher qualification by substandard reward. This numbers argument is rubbish! Every year, over 200 law students graduate from law school and about 180 from medical school. Not one law school graduate can replace any senior or experienced lawyer who decides to leave the profession or migrate for whatever reason. I used to insist that law school graduates assigned to me as mentor never did anything that left the office without my vetting and supervision for three years.

Every medical school graduate must do a year as an intern and another as a senior house officer before becoming a resident. Residency programmes vary from four-six years.

So for Jamaica’s sake, stop quarrelling about numbers and try developing a vision for education. Or does that not buy enough votes?

KAYMAR JORDAN

Like the rest of Jamaica, I was shocked at Tuesday’s announcement that Gleaner Editor-in-Chief Kaymar Jordan was moving on to other opportunities. Then I was saddened. Her stewardship at The Gleaner, an institution rapidly on the decline when she arrived and,restructured under her creative and intellectually outstanding guidance, now on a solidly upward trajectory, has been nothing short of remarkable.

My time with Kaymar has been a tale of two relationships. In January 2020, shortly before the pandemic struck, while “vacationing” in UHWI’s “The Wing” struck down with what The Old Ball and Chain was certain was a terminal illness, I was visited by my beloved Gleaner handler (then also the Opinion Editor). Anyone familiar with my volatile stay at The Gleaner will know I don’t require an editor but my many quirks (most of them grumpy) mean I must be assigned a handler.

I digress. While lying on a hospital bed gasping for my race book, my handler advised that Gleaner was “restructuring” and I was to reduce my twice weekly contributions by half. Generously, she (the handler, NOT Kaymar) told me I could choose which one to cut followed by “so I’ll get next Sunday’s Column soon?”

Sigh. I reminded her that I began as, and will always be, a Tuesday columnist. The Sunday contributions (very much my personal second favourite) only began when the great Garfield Grandison created them as his diplomatic way to resolve several word-count clashes between me and previous opinion editors. I also reminded her that I wrote two weekly columns for two completely different reader demographics and I wasn’t about to choose one and abandon the other.

So as soon as I was able to disappoint Old BC by recovering, I assisted with the restructuring by withdrawing both, and The Gleaner’s Opinion pages improved significantly for 18 months without my generally unwelcome intrusions. Without ever having met or spoken to Kaymar, I was NOT a fan. It only goes to prove you should never judge a book from a book review, especially an unintentional one.

Then one Monday in late(ish) 2021, my phone (that noisy, jangling invasion of privacy) rang. Because I’ve only just graduated from rotary-dial instruments, my phone has no modern feature. My “Caller-ID”, as it has been all my life, is to answer the phone (which I don’t often do). This time, I did and was greeted by a beautiful Bajan accent that took me right back to my very enjoyable second year as a Barbados resident many moons ago.

Kaymar introduced herself; told me she had heard my commentary on That’s A Rap the day before and thought it was time I returned to The Gleaner. “I would very much like to see your work appear again in the Sunday and Tuesday Gleaners,” she said. Well, I tried my best to play hard to get, but the truth was she had me from “hello”, and I gushed uncharacteristically to the point of telling her just that. Since then we’ve conducted one of the best professional relationships I’ve experienced.

Although the pandemic (and my congenital reclusiveness) has meant we are yet to meet face to face, we speak as often as possible (on that awful phone thingy I dislike so much AND by e-mail), share thoughts on many topics, and she has always been there for me to keep me on a righteous path and calm me down when some Gleaner cock-up irritates me. I’ve come to highly respect and admire her intellect, compassion, and most of all, her deep commitment to the Caribbean as a region and her drive to make it better.

Oh, and thanks for teaching me how to spell “cou-cou”, which I always thought was spelled like the clock.

So this transfer to Trinidadian media shouldn’t have surprised me. Someone of her calibre is sure to be constantly head-hunted. I only wish we had more time together.

Kaymar, The Gleaner, and its resident Grumpy Old Man are better for your time here. I’m sure Jamaica’s loss will be Trinidad’s gain.

Walk good, my friend, and good Duppy walk wid yu.

Peace and Love!

Gordon Robinson is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.