Ronald Thwaites | No shortcut in education standards

My young friend Sydney has given up the tutorial teaching he was doing at the university level. The frustration of trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to reach his class virtually has taken its toll. At least one-half of his students have had no consistent connection since COVID-19 struck.

Furthermore, even before March, he had been informed by the person in charge of his faculty that he really should not mark down any student for grammar or English expression. Also, it was obliquely but clearly suggested to him that the policy was to try not to pass every student – no matter how their performance was. High enrolment and tuition income are essential to the institution’s existence. Sydney has turned to selling insurance.

Echoes of Sydney’s distress were heard this week. Linvern Wright, president of the Jamaica Association of Principals, who represents the principals of high schools is quoted in the newspaper as recommending to the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) that in this year’s exams they should “provide options for students to show their skills and competencies but do not necessarily demand the wide coverage (of knowledge) that would only be possible in a normal year”. In plain speak, CXC should dumb down the standards, give us a ‘bly’; you done know how it go...

Sadly, Education Minister Fayval Williams is also quoted as agreeing: “Concerns have been expressed about the ability of students to complete exams successfully, given challenges with pedagogical continuity due to limitation of in-person learning ... the ministry (of education) shares these concerns and has begun negotiations with the CXC”.

What kind of negotiations, minister? To lower the scope and assessment of our school-leaving exams which many in academia (like Sydney) and among employers consider too low? This would be disastrous. Watering down the already-inadequate standards will be an act of contempt and cruelty to all students who are affected.

And if once reduced, when will the levels ever be elevated again? No! Any such move will debase the currency of education at every grade level, and a whole generation of pupils will have imposed on them the lie of false achievement by those who want to save face. The ripple of consequences will compromise them throughout later life.

DIMINISH CHANCES FOR EXCELLENCE

Just follow Sydney’s students, whose pre-pandemic grade threes at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) – diminish the chances for excellence to which they aspire and which the nation desperately requires in order to prosper.

Those kids who we think we’re helping will keep having to beg for a ‘ease-up’ through life; a ‘let-off’ by the standard-setters of the global economy in which we must compete. Later efforts at remediation are far more expensive, and much more likely to fail, than to get the education right the first time.

The newspaper reports further that there is an effort to pressure the CXC “to rectify last year’s poor grades”. If mistakes were made, of course, correct them; but don’t compromise the standards of adjudication and accountability any more. We already do it by ‘graduating’ illiterates in full regalia every year. Poppy-show!

There is a hard but virtuous alternative to the proposed pitfall of pretending that students have achieved when they have not. It is to admit, as Principal Wright and Minister Williams implicitly do, that the majority of Jamaica’s 600,000 students have lost a year’s worth of effective teaching and learning due to the pandemic.

The nation needs to demand that we get the children back to in-person school as quickly and safely as possible and redo the syllabi, which ought to have been covered between last

March and December. Postpone the CSEC, Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination, Primary Exit Profile and grade-four exams until that has been done. Anything less is delusional and counterproductive. There is no shortcut around the educational backsliding taking place in the land.

We have been complacent in allowing automatic promotion and the reduced assessment standards which leave half of school-leavers at every grade level without adequate certification and, very often, a false idea of what they have achieved. This is why 70 per cent of workers are uncertified and why prosperity is a mirage.

Now is the time to confront reality rather than to lurch in the direction conceded by Sydney’s supervisors and suggested, however compassionately, by Mr Wright and the minister.

Jamaica will never escape the perils of being a low-wage economy with truncated social attainment unless we set and attain high educational standards for everyone, not just for the few. Alongside keeping healthy, this has to be the nation’s supreme objective for 2021.

I contend that this is both affordable and attainable in the short term, if we are radical enough to want it and work for it.

Christmas and New Year blessings to all!

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.