Owen Speid | Ill-prepared for PEP

If there was ever research done to reveal the impact of the Revised Primary Curriculum and the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) on the outcomes of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations, I would certainly like to see those findings.

My curiosity has arisen out of the fact that students have repeatedly been passing CSEC subjects at the General Proficiency level from as early as eighth and ninth grade in secondary school after coming out of GSAT just under three years ago, yet, there is an indecent haste to implement the 'new' National Standards Curriculum and its accompanying Primary Exit Profile (PEP).

Besides, there is clear lack of physical and mental preparedness of the relevant stakeholders to make this complicated transition.

Indeed, could GSAT be all that bad if it was able to lay foundation for many of our students to achieve CSEC success that early at the secondary level?

Based on the demands of the new curriculum and the resources stipulated to implement same, poorer schools, and particularly those located in remote areas, will struggle, and their students be placed at a disadvantage.

The argument that grants per student were increased over the last year is a poor and disingenuous one as everyone in the ministry came to an understanding that primary schools have long been underfunded and were barely surviving. That paltry increase cannot suffice in providing resources to implement the National Standards Curriculum. Many schools and teachers cannot afford to purchase laptops, projectors, speakers and are not able to access the Internet from their locale.

It is not amusing, either, that there are no textbooks to match the grade levels in the context of the requirements of the National Standards Curriculum.

Contrary to the arguments posited by at least one high-ranking official in the Ministry of Education, a large percentage of our teachers have still not had access to either hard or soft copies of the curriculum. I am aware that the curriculum, which is more than 100 pages at each grade level, was given only to teachers present at the summer workshops of 2017. These were given on thumb drives, many of which failed to open and have had to be discarded.

Why can't the ministry send hard copies of the curriculum to each school rather than assuming all will be able to access it online?

Assessment and placement

It is obvious that PEP will be used as a placement tool, and I suspect that there will be issues to be worked through. The first concern is that there will be projects, as well as open-ended items in the performance-based tests at all grade levels from grades four to six. Here comes the subjectivity in scoring and where the human element could distort the true outcome or results.

This is dangerous for any placement examination, and I think that multiple-choice items are always better usage if the results of the tests are to be used for placement. I think, also, that with the number of children in our regular classrooms who are struggling with learning disabilities, it is not fair to load them with these projects and open-ended items as they will not be able to express themselves in writing to the extent of their potential.

I would like to see a child who does poorly at grade four but very well at grade six be placed not based on anything that he did in the year of struggle two years before, but by what he was able to achieve in his final year of primary school. Indeed, that is how good he is.

I think the ministry needs to re-examine its steps and not get ahead of itself while trying to implement PEP.

- Owen R. Speid is principal of Rousseau Primary School in St Andrew. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and speidowen@yahoo.com.