Ronald Thwaites | More straight and crooked thinking

Last Friday. this newspaper quoted, in part, my opposition to the mandatory sixth-form project announced recently by the Ministry of Education. But only in part. Left out was my main concern about the idea – that a majority of students progressing past grade 11 have not achieved the fundamentals required for them to benefit from advanced education and training.

When you normalised social promotion rather than advancement based on achievement, later results are bound to be suboptimal, frustration is high, and both students and the broad economy are cheated because of crooked thinking. You can’t build a strong superstructure at the high, secondary and tertiary levels on the weak foundations of the early-childhood and Primary segments.

That was the lesson I learned from the outcomes of the admirably conceived and expensively implemented Career Advancement Programme (CAP), as well as many HEART Trust projects, when I assumed responsibility for them in 2012. Most CAP students needed the JAMAL programme before any equivalent of sixth-form work.

I concentrated on raising levels of literacy and numeracy at grade four. Despite the modest success, the systemic underachievement of mostly poor, black and mainly male Jamaican children persists. Efforts to ensure that the minimum standard for graduation from grade 11 should be a certification at CSEC or City & Guilds in English and mathematics, and at least one marketable skill, were resisted as impractical.

I acknowledge that the efforts and advances made during my tenure were inadequate.

Listen now to representative snippets of the executive summary of Professor Orlando Patterson’s recently completed report on the state of Jamaica’s education system.

“...Over 17 per cent of primary-age children are not in school, due mainly to economic factors (lunch money and transportation fare) and boredom”.

“Jamaica has a severe learning crisis, in that a majority of students at the end of primary school remain illiterate and innumerate and most leave secondary school with no marketable skills ... . Most students leave secondary school without a certificate – 70 per cent of the 18-year-old cohort in 2018.”

GRIM REALITY

Sadly, there is a more grim reality to come. The Reform of Education in Jamaica Report 2021 chronicles that when the Primary Exit Profile shifted grade-six students away from the memorised learning of the GSAT era to the testing of analytic skills, “only 41 per cent passed in mathematics, 49 per cent in science and 55 per cent in language arts. A breakdown of the language arts results indicated that a third of students at the end of primary school could not read, 56 per cent could not write, and 57 per cent could not identify information in a simple sentence”.

One could go on. There is an urgent need for a national discourse on the analysis and recommendations of this commission, even though we knew much of it already. Why has it not been released to the public?

Two extra years of education is in principle an admirable advance. But the way it has been proposed cannot achieve the desired outcomes and is a crooked-thinking approach to education transformation. Before any other priority, there has to be a coherent, executable plan to abolish illiteracy, innumeracy and poor social attitudes among school-leavers. Then more students will be ready, both attitudinally and academically, for transition to higher training.

Failure at the lower levels of the system – not the absence of universal sixth form – are the ills causing weak investment, high unemployment, low productivity, execrable public behaviour and chronic crime.

Show us that there is an intense remediation component to the sixth-form idea, absent so far, and it begins to reflect straight thinking. It bears saying again that we should be repeating the whole lost year and a half, with a sturdy emphasis on the socio-emotional correction. Why has the commission not recommended this, given their own analysis of the pre-COVID-19 state of play – now manifestly much deteriorated?

Nigel Clarke is a cautious financier and someone who has been the beneficiary of excellent education. So I ask him three questions to start. Is he willing to reconfigure the upcoming Budget for us to afford the minimum $25 billion added per year to the present allotment needed to set sustainable transformation in play?

Next, can he persuade his wrong-headed colleagues that quality education is such a valuable personal and national good that it cannot be financed solely by the taxpayers, but must involve contributions from all who can afford it. Last, why spend big money now on the sixth form caper when the returns will be well below what is required?

And, more broadly, to all concerned with education, especially the Government with its all-powerful 49 seats, and given all the above, can we dream of a collaborative education effort in 2022 instead of edicts from Heroes Circle? It won’t work otherwise, you know.

MORE ON BAUXITE

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the debacle involving the Jamalco alumina plant and the unfair (to us) business arrangements between CAP and the Noble Company. Thanks to many who responded, I now know more, and many questions arise.

How come our partners are making money and ascribing high value to our assets and we are getting ‘pity-mi-likkle’? How much does Jamaica earn from that company since the partnership, and, indeed, from the whole industry, when you’ quits out’ the huge cost to the environment?

How did the big fire really start, and who controls the huge insurance money? Is the bauxite levy firmly back in place? Have we reversed the folly of profit-sharing? Show us the contracts and the figures, please. After all, it is our money and while we appreciate foreign partners, the time has come to stop the ‘advantage-taking’. Jamaica has contributed enough through history, and up to now, to the wealth and well-being of developed countries.

On Tuesday, October 16, 2018, more than three years ago, the following motion was tabled for debate in the House of Representatives:

“No. 71 Reverend Thwaites to move – BE IT RESOLVED that this Honourable House cause to be carried out a cost-benefit analysis of the Jamaican bauxite and alumina industry in order to determine the prudent and efficient use of this diminishing natural resource”.

In the way of its self-induced uselessness, Parliament never permitted this resolution to be debated. Why? Could public exposure and an attempt at genuinely collaborative policy-making have helped to avert the debacle of CAP, the intended assault on the Cockpit Country, and the ‘don’t know what a gwan’ disappointment of JISCO?

What leverage does the minister really have by himself to protect us from pirates? We don’t need a scapegoat. Even now, couldn’t the sector benefit from some straight answers rather than the crooked twisting of recent events?

New Year’s blessings!

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