Editorial | The problem is reading

We support the latest initiatives announced by the education ministry aimed at turning around the dismal performance by Jamaican students in mathematics in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams.

But even if – as the education minister, Fayval Williams, expects – these achieve near-term success and the pass rate rises next year, neither Ms Williams nor her technocrats must lose sight of the fundamental cause of the crisis in mathematics.

The shortage and inadequacies of maths teachers and insufficient contact time on the subject between students and teachers are contributing factors. But the crisis in mathematics is also a crisis in reading.

The former cannot be sustainably fixed without addressing the latter, which is an argument that has also been advanced by Samuel McDaniel, a lecturer in mathematics at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.

CSEC is the principal high school matriculation exam for students in the English-speaking Caribbean. Passes in five subjects, inclusive of maths and English, are considered the basic threshold for students to go on to higher education, or to be reasonably ready for the world of work.

But in Jamaica, fewer than a fifth (18 per cent this year) of students who write the exams pass five subjects in a single sitting, with maths and English among them.

Moreover, this year, only 33.4 per cent of the students passed maths, maintaining a post-COVID-19 decline in a subject in which Jamaica has been historically weak. The great bulk of the passes were at the lowest grade – three – which the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), which administers the exams, classifies as representing a “fairly good” rather than a “good” or “excellent” standard of performance.

TARGETED INTERVENTIONS

Addressing the CSEC performance last week, Kasan Troupe, the permanent secretary (chief civil servant) in the education ministry, suggested that the turnaround effort will include targeted interventions in schools, mostly at the primary level, and more time allocated for mathematics classes.

“How that will unpack this year is that we have gone into the 245 schools, and this includes 56 secondary-level institutions, and we have pulled out their data in terms of their performance,” Dr Troupe said. “We have looked to see how they rolled out their learning programme in terms of the time allotted on the timetable to execute the syllabus for the assessments that they do, and we are going to be helping our schools to do that differently.”

The CSEC mathematics syllabus, she explained, was to be covered over two academic years, with students having 3.3 contact hours each week in the subject.

“We have not done that well,” Dr Troupe said. “When we looked at some of our timetables, our students were not getting the fulsome experience. We also know that most of our learners do well because they go to private classes and extra lessons – that, in essence, is extended learning.

“What we will do is to bring that into the formal process by increasing the time on the timetable to five hours of mathematics per week in these project schools that we are working with.”

Additionally, the education ministry will post barcodes for apps at places where students congregate, allowing them to access, via smartphones, examination past papers and other learning information while they, say, wait for buses.

The Gleaner welcomes these planned efforts.

However, we remind the authorities of Dr McDaniel’s intervention in August in the debate on educational outcomes in mathematics.

He said: “The critical link to mathematics is the ability to read and to understand; because if you cannot read, you cannot understand, and if you cannot understand a particular (mathematics) problem, then you cannot solve the problem.”

FOUNDATIONAL

The point is, as we have consistently argued in these columns, reading and comprehending in the language of instruction is foundational to learning in any subject, including children grasping how to do their sums.

At CSEC, nearly one in four (36 per cent) Jamaican students fail English. Before then, annually, a third of students complete their primary education (grade six) essentially illiterate. Over 40 per cent fail to attain the standard for competency in maths.

Even these figures, as the Patterson Commission on transformation of the education system observed, understate the depth of the problem. In a 2019 assessment, 56 per cent of grade-six students could not extract information from a simple English sentence.

This problem persists in high school, especially those in poor inner-city and rural communities, which receive the bulk of ill-prepared students.

Denham Town High School, in downtown western Kingston, is one of those. A study last year, as part of a remedial project, showed that over 96 per cent of its students read significantly below their age and grade levels.

However, an intervention using the Lindamood-Bell technique – a teaching system developed by two American women – dramatically reduced the reading deficit.

The Lindamood-Bell system can be applied to all subjects, which suggests to this newspaper that if it is not being done, a Denham Town-style intervention should be replicated across Jamaica at schools with similar challenges.

But more fundamentally, the mission of the primary school system should be reset. It must be the core mandate of the system that, but for exceptional circumstances, no child should complete their primary education unable to read, write, comprehend and do sums at their age and grade levels.

This, underpinned by law, must also mean an end to the system of the annual automatic promotion of children, regardless of their state of literacy or numeracy.