Imani Tafari-Ama | Reflections on Primary Exit Profile results

It was shocking to hear the minister of education’s assessment of the results of the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examination results. The notion that boys are underperforming vis-à-vis their female counterparts in mathematics and language arts and outperforming them in science and social studies raises obvious questions. Which boys and which girls? Boys and girls are not homogeneous categories. We have been having this problem for decades so this anomaly should have been addressed ages ago.

Children who attend prestigious preparatory schools, which have small class sizes compared to the many overcrowded primary schools, benefit from the class-specific availability of quality education. If you can afford to pay for your child to attend prep school, that child’s exposure to extracurricular activities like robotics and swimming may support cognitive and social development in ways that, with all due respect, the child who attends primary school may not. Yet schools like St. Richard’s Primary produces good results by primary school standards. Children from under-resourced primary schools have also been leap-frogging over their more socially burnished peers. This begs for critical research and analysis.

The urgent need to decolonise the curricula is for another discussion. What is urgent here is the the application of critical reflection mechanisms to differentiate where the candidates are coming from and to look more closely at the factors that affect performance. How do children from under-resourced schools and under-served communities perform in relation to children from more endowed households and institutions? To what extent is class a factor in how well children perform? How much more effort must the student from under-resourced schools make to acquire the aptitude of children who are well supported, socio-economically and psycho-socially? Does it follow that children who are well-resourced are guaranteed to succeed? Or are privileged children falling through cracks we may assume are set for children from disadvantaged circumstances?

INSTRUCTED SEPARATELY

What of the suggestion that boys should be instructed separately from girls? It was extraordinary to hear the “informed” assessment that boys are more adventurous than girls and girls are more compliant being cited as fundamental factors influencing the gender-specific PEP results. These tendencies may result from social conditioning, but are not normal or natural. If girls are encouraged to be adventurous they will be. Similarly, boys who are trained to be socially compliant from an early age, may and do outshine their female counterparts in academic performance. Ultimately, despite the numerical edge that women have in universities in Jamaica, men still command top-paying jobs and salaries.

When the numbers sitting the exams were crunched, 36,078 students registered of which 18,495 were boys and 17,583 were girls. Just under a thousand in the matriculation difference. Are assumptions of development delays assumed to occur in boys responsible for their lagging in two subjects? The fact that boys outshone girls in the science and social studies subjects has not resulted in lamentations for the girls on those scores. Why not? Boys are already suffering from pathological assumptions of a direct relationship between masculinity and violence. Now, they must contend with this mushrooming analysis that they are somehow inferior to girls, since mathematics and language arts are touted as primary prerequisites for any career.

There is some suspicion that teachers may offer extra lessons as compensation for failure to complete curricular instruction within the required schedule. How many children were disadvantaged because of the lagging performance of lax teachers? Of those who needed the extra instruction, how many were able to afford this luxury? Extra lessons are not always affordable for parents who are already stretched with regular expenses like transportation, lunch money, school fees, textbooks, uniform, subject and extra-curricular activity costs.

The minister also reported that 85.5 per cent of students were placed in their first-choice schools. What is not addressed in this assertion is the streaming of students who attend prestigious preparatory schools into so-called traditional high schools. Students from typically overcrowded primary schools are routinely placed in so-called new secondary schools. The distinction that is made between these institutional streams is classist and unquestioned. Although children from under-resourced schools also end up in traditional high schools, this requires expenditure of extra effort to level up to what is taken for granted to be a higher level of performance of children who attend preparatory schools. Exceptions prove this rule.

ADEQUATE RESOURCES

When a student’s first choice is Immaculate Conception High School, rated the top performer on the island, it means that that child is assured of the availability of adequate resources to support his or her scholastic development. This school typically, the first choice of a child who lives in the under-served community of Payne Land. Further, exceptionalising children like Timar Jackson (as did former Education Minister Ronald Thwaites in his 2014-15 report), who transcended the norm of his social environment and produced excellent results, reinforces the classism inherent to such glorification.

The normalisation of the dichotomy between “the rich man in his castle” and “the poor man at his gate”, the metaphor in the song All things Bright and Beautiful of social stratification is what makes the Timar Jackson’s exceptionalism problematic. Reinforcement of the social inequalities symbolised by the singing of such songs in schools shows how entrenched is the apartheid articulated by the hierarchically organised school system.

When assessing the breakdown of the results of the children from one prestigious preparatory school, one parent shared, with pride, that the students were well distributed among the top-performing urban high schools. None of the students had picked to transition to Mona High, which is ranked 44th and is located uptown. There are 161 high schools in Jamaica, and they have a code that determines social as well as academic rankings. Currently, the top-ten schools are Immaculate Conception High, Campion College, St. Hilda’s Diocesan High, Hampton High, Mt. Alvernia High, Wolmer’s High School for Girls, Westwood High, Glenmuir High, DeCarteret College and St. Andrew High School for Girls.

The “good” schools carry a prestige and (relatively) high price tag and enjoy high performance ratings in academic and extracurricular activities. There is also a direct correlation in these institutions between resource availability and performance. Although there is no guarantee that students’ PEP performance will carry through to high school and tertiary accomplishment, it is likely that the high schools that benefit from the matriculation of the cream of the preparatory schools’ crops will outshine their less- endowed counterparts who attended primary schools. Certainly, the factors which disadvantage any child in any way need to be critically scrutinized in the formulation of sustainable development policies for the education sector.

Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com