Editorial | Emphasise reading

Mark Smith’s claim that the test to assess the education achievements of Jamaica’s primary school is off the rails, leading to burnout among students, must not be rejected out of hand by the island’s education authorities.

Instead, the conclusion by the new president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association demands urgent attention, and what this newspaper has previously recommended: a reset of the primary schools to ensure that no student leaves the system, at the end of grade six, not able to read or do sums at their age level.

In other words, there should be an end to the system of the automatic promotion of students from grade to grade, even when they do not meet the grade-level literacy requirements. In the face of a crisis, the education system has to get back to basics.

Dr Smith took up office at the teachers’ union conference this week, and used his investiture speech to offer a critique of the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) tests, which, ostensibly, is a three-year tracking of students, concluding with a series of exams in grade six.

Started in 2019 to replace the previous Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT), PEP was supposed to emphasise creative thinking and problem-solving over the assessment period, rather than testing accumulated learning in a single exam.

But, according to Dr Smith, the view of many teachers, himself included, is that PEP “is nothing more than GSAT on steroids”.

While supporting the conceptual foundation of PEP, Dr Smith questioned the “age appropriateness and the complexity of some of the tasks that children are asked to do”.

He suggested that the period of stress faced by students, rather than being reduced, was now stretched over three years, “and we are now seeing the burnout of children”, who still confront a “high-stakes” exam.

ESSENTIALLY ILLITERATE

All the things that are apparent to Dr Smith and his colleagues in the classrooms are laid bare in the annual data on Jamaica’s educational outcomes, including at the primary level.

Although officials note that these represent improvements on the figures for recent years, the fact is that in 2024, of the 35,000 students who did the PEP exams, a third failed to meet the standards for proficiency in language arts. In mathematics, 40 per cent were below the proficiency standards.

Consistently over the years, around seven per cent of the students who are behind are so far adrift as to be considered beginners, requiring major interventions to be ready to absorb secondary-level education.

This crisis of reading and communications, and doing the basics in sums, is transferred to high schools. For instance, at Denham Town High School in Kingston, a reading intervention programme by a domestic NGO found that less than three per cent of its more than 1,000 students read at their age and grade levels.

Unsurprisingly, fewer than three in 10 Jamaican students (28 per cent) who write the Caribbean Examinations Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams pass five subjects, inclusive of maths and English, in a single sitting.

It is equally unsurprising, in the circumstances, that Jamaica’s tertiary-level enrolment is no more than 30 per cent of the age cohort, and that around 65 per cent of workers have no specific training or certification for the jobs they do.

The bottom line is that a third of the students entering high school are essentially illiterate in the language of instruction. And many who meet the PEP proficiency standards still struggle with English and comprehension in that language.

STRONG INVESTMENT IN EXPERTISE

That is a clear path to the crises of the type discovered at Denham Town High and similar schools, which tend to get their students from the primary institutions with the worst outcomes. Notably, too, most of the students in this group come from the most challenged socioeconomic strata of society. Of course, there are many causes for Jamaica’s deep problems in education, and perhaps many ways to transform it from what Dr Smith described as “pockets of excellence on a sea of mediocrity”.

But there is one which, in The Gleaner’s view, is fundamental: it is reading, stupid.

In that regard, as the authorities work on the other solutions, we again recommend that Jamaica adopt the approach of several of America’s southern states, especially Mississippi, which faced a deep reading crisis among grade school students, but were able to quickly lift standards.

Backed by legislation and supported by a strong investment in expertise, they ended the promotion of students unless they read to their grade levels. From the bottom of the pack, Mississippi, in a dozen years, moved from the bottom of the pack to the top quantile in reading among US grade school students.

Mississippi’s high school graduation has also improved. In the 2022-23 academic year, it was 89.4 per cent, from 75.5 per cent in 2013. Its high school dropout rate 0f 8.5 per cent was down from approximately 14 per cent a decade ago.

Jamaica can do it, too.