We assume that Jamaican teachers, like other human beings, possess the capacity for embarrassment and shame.

These are emotions that should be patently evident among teachers, assuming that they read newspapers or, with any interest, seriously contemplate issues surrounding their profession and the outcomes they expect from their jobs. Two issues should have affected teachers and the wider education fraternity.

The Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), this newspaper reported, is insisting that it will not be part of an agreement between the Government and trade unions to limit wage hikes to public sector employees, over the next two fiscal years, to around 20 per cent. They want more.

That, by itself, would be worthy of significant debate about the status of the teaching profession and the basis on which its members are rewarded. The JTA has for years resisted performance-based pay.

But there is a wider and fuller context to this matter. The publication of The Gleaner's report on the performance of Jamaican secondary students in their math and English exams that highlights the shambolic state of education and how the island's schools continue to fail our children.

This document, too, represents a statement to the ineptitude of the policy planners and mangers of the education system. In businesses and institutions where people are held accountable with seriousness, most, on this evidence, would be without jobs.

Indeed, Dr Ralph Thompson, the lawyer, businessman, poet and, in later life, the educational activist, has for years been drawing attention to the mirage that the education ministry has been proffering about the state of secondary education. And that is dismal enough.

Based on the ministry's data, which cover only students who actually sat the CXC secondary exams, 52 per cent of the 22,375 who wrote English this year gained a pass. The rate was 35.6 per cent for the 18,606 who did math.

But Dr Thompson prefers to use the whole cohort, including those children screened out by schools and those of the age group but out of the system. On this basis, the pass rate for English is 29 per cent and 16.5 per cent for mathematics. But this masks an even deeper problem, the division between categories of schools. When these are dis-aggregated, the figures are even more depressingly stark: the pass rate in math for secondary high schools is 45.5 per cent, against 9.7 per cent for technical high schools and 3.9 per cent for upgraded high schools.

Bill Johnson, the pollster, has now weighted the outcomes of the exam based on the grade received by students of each school, and the chasm is frighteningly wide. But, even based on this, only a handful of high/secondary schools, based on their performances in math and English over the past two years, would have anything to be proud about. Or, to be blunt about it, the outcomes, for the most part, are dismal.

Dr Thompson is an advocate for a reform of education based on the primary focus on and substantial resources going to the early childhood sector. We agree.

But there is an urgent need for taking responsibility in schools. It would be surprising to us that many principals, having looked at The Gleaner's analysis and the performance of their own schools would not be offering resignations to their boards.