The Editor, Sir:

In your editorial of April 9, 2008, you argued that teachers and principals of schools that have failed to attain desirable levels of success in the CXC examinations should be ashamed. You then concluded by suggesting that that the proper thing for many of those school administrators to do would be to resign. While I believe that your comments are motivated by a genuine interest in the education of our children, your conclusions are based on at least one irrelevant premise, but reflects a basic misunderstanding of the fundamental problem that is at the core of the failure of our secondary school system.

School system

Your insistence on drawing a parallel between the outcomes of these schools and the private sector is not only untenable, but also betrays your ignorance regarding the reality of our school system. You have unfortunately chosen to focus on the output while disregarding the input, as well as the numerous constraints which militate against achieving the results that most of us would like to see.

Might I suggest that you commission a companion study to Dr Ralph Thompson's with the aim of understanding the level of 'competence' of our students as they enter each of these secondary schools at the Grade 7 level.

You will find it surprising that many of these schools achieve any success at all. You might also want to have an exchange experiment between principals and teachers from these 'failure' schools and those schools that have traditionally achieved better results. I believe, in the end, you will find that it is much easier to be critical of the efforts of the educators than it is to walk a day in their shoes.

I am, etc.,

WAYNE BINGHAM

binghamwayne@hotmail.com

Toronto, Ontario

Canada

Via Go-Jamaica