The unhealthy state of education

Elsewhere in this newspaper are published some depressingly bad statistics that lay bare again the unhealthy state of education, and its need for frank acknowledgement by all stakeholders if Jamaica is to have a chance at fixing the problem and a decent shot at survival in tomorrow's world.

The situation is demanding of honesty from, more than any, those who occupy the most pivotal positions to transform the country's dysfunctional and underachieving educational system: the policymakers and bureaucrats at the education ministry, and those in the leadership of that powerful, and powerfully intransigent trade union, the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA).

In the data we highlight, Dr Ralph Thompson, the businessman and education activist, further peels away deception by the education ministry to downplay just how sickly is the patient over which it expensively presides. The ministry, in talking about Jamaica's performance in the CSEC secondary-level exams, likes to trot out, for public consumption, the pass/fail ratios based on students who sat the tests.

Ill-prepared

Those outcomes are bad enough, but they do not tell half the story. For, each year, upward of half the eligible students are screened out of the CXC exams, on the assumption that they are ill-prepared for the tests. Dr Thompson insists, nonetheless, that the better - and proper - measure of performance has to be the pass/failure rate against the eligible cohort for the year.

Take the core subjects, maths and English. By the education ministry's measure, in last year's exam, 22,121 did English at CXC, of whom 11,979 got between grades one and three - for a pass rate of 54.2 per cent. In maths, of the 18,749 who sat the exam, 8,101 passed, for a pass rate of 43.2 per cent, a near eight percentage points improvement on the previous year.

Even with the improvement, those figures are hardly ones over which to celebrate. But as Dr Thompson pointed out, the real number against which performance should be judged is the 39,155 children who were in grade 11 at time of the exams. When viewed from that angle, a mere 31 per cent of the eligible cohort passed English, while the ratio for maths is a little better than one in five, or 20.7 per cent.

Misguided assumption

Even these numbers distort the dismal state of education, and how the country wastes the future of large numbers of children depending on where they happen to go to school. For example, the pass rate for English at a traditional high school is around 63 per cent, for maths it is 40.5 per cent. But for an upgraded high school only 11.5 per of the cohort passed English and a minuscule four per cent, maths.

The education ministry is privy to all the data, but the bureaucrats prefer to feed the public palliatives, in part because of a misguided assumption that it is good politics. More important, living a lie is part of self-preservation; a way to hide from accountability.

As so it is for the JTA, whose leadership will explain away the gaps in the performance between the various categories of schools on the differences in resources, with little or nothing to do with administrative leadership, performance or the basis of performance.

This failure all round to take responsibility is highly irresponsible.

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