Editorial | Seek public buy-in on Patterson report

The good news is that, finally, we can discern the outlines of a systematic plan for implementing the recommendations of the Orlando Patterson Commission on transforming education in Jamaica. It has gone beyond Christopher Stokes' appointment as head of an oversight committee for the project.

Last week Dr Stokes named 16 other people who will serve with him, including four who were either members of the Patterson Commission or had been co-opted by it to help with the work. Dr Stokes' committee also has more than a healthy sprinkling of education professionals, or persons with interest in the field, among whom is the shadow education minister. On the face of it, this is a reasonably balanced and competent team.

Or, as Dr Stokes put it at a press conference he hosted with the education minister, Fayval Williams, “the committee is made up of persons from diverse backgrounds … (which) ensures diversity of thought and importantly, provides a reservoir of knowledge to draw on as we go about the work of ETOC (Education Transformation Oversight Committee)”.

Included in the framework of how his committee intends to approach its work is an initial timetable, going up to the end of October this year, for things to be accomplished by then. Notably, that is the date on which ETOC proposes to convene a town hall meeting, which, presumably, will be part of its efforts to gin up public support for the project.

“A communication plan has been developed, which will guide how we interact with our diverse stakeholder groups,” Stokes said.

LOST TOO MUCH TIME

This newspaper welcomes this planned gathering, but is concerned that policymakers have already lost too much time in communicating with the public on the report and seem destined to lose more.

Based on what he outlined, Dr Stokes' ETOC has already done much preparatory work on an implementation strategy. Apparently having distilled the Patterson report, it seems to be clear about hiring of a chief transformation officer (CTO) and a project officer to be in charge of the day-to-day running of the project. These hires, plus a consultant to draft a work plan, should be in place by the end of September.

At the same time, Minister Williams said that her ministry, which the Patterson Commission suggested requires a major overhaul, said that her team was already at work implementing aspects of the findings. “Of the 199 recommendations, 54 have been prioritised as the ones that will have the biggest impact in the shortest possible time,” the minister said. She didn't say which ones these were, but added: “Already, we've had various policymaking group meetings where we have interrogated our literacy and numeracy programmes as well our higher education policies.”

Which brings us back to the fundamental findings of the Patterson report and Dr Stokes' implementation strategy, including his planned end-of-October town hall meeting.

When broken down to its core, the evocative metaphor for the crisis highlighted by Patterson Commission is captured in bits of statistics regularly quoted by this newspaper in its comments on the document. A third of Jamaica's students leave primary school illiterate. Fifty-six can't write. Fifty-eight per cent struggle to identify information in simple English sentences. Note that English is the language of instruction in the island's schools.

At the secondary level, of the students who sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, less than half pass five or more subjects at a single sitting, and of those who do, less than 30 per cent can count mathematics and English language among those subjects.

STARTS AT EARLY CHILDHOOD

But as the Patterson Commission noted, the genesis of this crisis isn't the primary and secondary system. It starts at the early childhood level, with its swathes of untrained and undertrained teachers and caregivers, and institutions that are underfunded and short on the material used to help stimulate young minds.

These problems are exacerbated by the country's deep social and economic cleavages and the skewed allocation to schools where parents are better able to finance the costs of their children's education.

The bottom line, therefore, is that fixing the crisis in Jamaica's education is not only about addressing structural or pedagogic issues. It is substantially too, a political matter. In other words, it also involves getting public support for hard decisions that have to be made, whether these are shifting power from the central education and upsetting an entrenched bureaucracy, or shifting public resources from the tertiary to the early childhood sector.

So while Dr Stokes is right that transformation programmes often fail because people in the targeted institutions “are usually busy and just don't have the time to focus on strategic initiatives while there are pressing daily operational activities”, there are usually other issues, too. Another major weakness tends to be that transformation initiatives don't have sufficient buy-in, especially when they are perceived to be top-down projects. There is the potential of that happening in this case.

It is nearly a year since the Patterson report was delivered to the Government. While there may have been back-room discussions on its content and work plans quietly developed, it has been the subject of very little public deliberation – what should be strategic priorities, if all its proffered solutions are right ones and whether issues have been missed.

This newspaper, of course, believes that the findings are mostly right, but doesn't presume to be the final arbiter on the matter. That is why, after the Government's unfortunately long delay, we look forward to the engagement of Dr Stokes' stakeholder groups and the wider public in addressing that national crisis. Perhaps, in retrospect, that October 30 date for the town hall seems to Dr Stokes a distance too far.