‘Give priority to education sector’

WESTERN BUREAU:

WITH TEACHER migration becoming the latest issue for concern in the educational sector, Dr Colin Greene, past president of the Caribbean Union of Teachers (CUT), says policymakers should focus on creating greater value for educators.

Greene made the call while addressing Monday’s opening session of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association’s (JTA) 58th annual conference at the Hilton Rose Hall Resort and Spa in Montego Bay, St James. The conference is being held under the theme ‘Revisiting the foundation: Building our human capital through equitable educational opportunities’.

“All nations, developing and developed, must invest in an education that increases the capacities of all its people. We have to identify the foundations on which recent education reforms were built, and to see how well they address the issue of equitable education[al] opportunities,” said Greene.

“Investing in education, knowledge and skills acquired becomes a social escalator and brings us closer to a position of meaningful equity. It means that Government and those in authority must get their priorities straight, and organisations like the JTA must be at the forefront of influencing policy that will amount to meaningful change on the value of all in education,” added Greene.

The former CUT president’s remarks come on the heels of reports that 167 educators have left Jamaica since July, leaving the sector in a state of uncertainty with less than two weeks to go before the start of the 2022-2023 school year.

Education Minister Fayval Williams has so far defended her ministry’s handling of the teacher migration issue, retorting that resignations are nothing strange in the education sector and ignored calls for her to resign in light of what appears to be a looming crisis.

On the issue of teachers’ salaries, Greene acknowledged that the lack of adequate remuneration is the primary reason educators seek better-paying jobs overseas.

“Teachers’ pay has emerged as a fundamental issue in education systems having the ability to retain their brightest and best minds. For those who write editorials questioning why you talk about pay, it is because it is important. There is no grass on the other side, there is money on the other side,” said Greene.

The experienced educator also noted that teachers are often used as scapegoats for failures to implement educational policies.

“There is a general tendency to blame teachers for the failure of education systems when, in fact, many of the problems find their genesis in ill-thought-out education policies or failure to implement real and meaningful education reform. If you do your research, you will find that every subsequent stage of education reform will tell you the failure of the one that went before was because [the] authorities failed to implement the very things that they recommended in the first place,” said Greene.

“Whenever society is not doing what it should do, it becomes the job of the school to fix that problem. If parents are not taking care of the children, people expect the school to fix it, and if society is not behaving in a manner that it ought to, people expect the school to fix it,” he continued.

“The role which education must play in the process of empowerment can be seen in both obvious and profound ways. We agree that young people in particular can be empowered to the extent that an education imparts marketable skills to these individuals.”

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com