Editorial | Lower heat on teacher shortage debate

Fayval Williams, on this matter, is wrong.

Teaching is not, as she suggests, like any other profession from which there is periodic attrition. Putting off the construction of buildings because of a shortage of architects or engineers is very unlikely to be catastrophic for a society. The same cannot be said of delaying the education of a whole cohort of children.

That point having been made, this newspaper urges stakeholders, particularly protagonists on either side of the political divide, to trade in their febrile rhetoric for objective, data-based, nuanced discussion of whether Jamaica is indeed facing a teacher crisis at the start of the new school year.

Ms Williams, the education minister, suggests that the figures do not support that claim, although some school principals have been reporting an exodus of critical teachers from their institutions. Julian Robinson, the shadow finance minister, claims that Ms Williams does not see the impending catastrophe because she has her head in the sand. Damion Crawford, the Opposition’s education spokesman, wants her resignation.

This quarrel, without specific figures, and context where that exists, is likely to deepen anxiety among parents who were already disquieted by the disruption of the education system, and the learning loss, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The urgency is to unravel the dimensions of the problem, if one really exists, and, thereafter, find the best solutions for it.

Jamaican teachers leaving the classroom in droves is neither new nor unique. They have in the past been enticed by demand for their skills, and much better pay to go with it, especially in the United States, Canada and Britain. The suggestion is that the island is facing another of those episodic pulls – especially from the USA, which is facing a major shortage of teachers.

There is no national database on the trek from the classroom, but the number is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. For instance, in Florida there were 8,000 open places in August, compared to 5,000 at the start of the previous school year in 2021. A January survey in the state of Illinois found that 88 per cent of school districts had “problems with teacher shortages”. The departure of teachers, analysts say, has been driven partly by burnout from the pandemic. Teachers are also being prompted by culture wars that have imposed restrictions in many school districts on how they engage students on matters of history, race, and sex.

In an effort to counter the resignations, some school districts have been hiring people without experience, increasing salaries, and offering recruits signing bonuses. The initial suggestion that some Jamaicans teachers are being enticed by job opportunities in the US, and elsewhere, was this newspaper’s recent report of head teachers lamenting the resignations of specialist teachers of English, mathematics, the sciences, and technical subjects – precisely the areas in which the island has a shortage of skilled and experienced teachers.

However, on Monday, Minister Williams reported that only 167 government-paid teachers had resigned since July, while 964 teachers who recently completed specialist training would enter the system in September. Looked at as a raw bit of statistics, the resignations are less than half of one per cent of the more than 25,000 teachers in public schools. Further, the departing teachers are only 17 per cent of the number of recruits.

That, however, is not necessarily the full story if the departing teachers possessed scarce skills and teaching experience which are not being immediately replaced by the recruits. In the search for solutions, these are the kinds of contextual issues that need to be addressed in calm, thoughtful dialogue, rather than protagonists hurling epithets across the room at each other, or employing dodgy data.

HUNT FOR BETTER COMPENSATION

Further, among the reasons Jamaican teachers leave classrooms to go abroad, or for different professions at home, is to get better pay. In the United States, an experienced elementary schoolteacher can expect to earn around US$56,000 a year, or over $8.4 million. That will not be matched here. It is, however, a call for Finance Minister Nigel Clarke to accelerate the implementation of the salary-upgrading element of the public sector reform programme.

It should prod the education ministry to seriously engage the teachers’ union on the scheme long proposed by this newspaper and endorsed by the recent Patterson Commission on education transformation: performance-based compensation for teachers. It cannot be difficult to design a system that is equitable, even as it identifies and rewards those who do outstanding work.

The ministry must also negotiate with the Jamaica Teachers’ Association for changes to employment contracts that tie teachers to specific schools, without the ministry’s ability to transfer them from where their skills are in oversupply to one where they are needed. Further, it does not make sense that almost at any point in a school year, one in 10 teachers is on extended leave because of colonial-era quirks that remain in employment arrangements. Those provisions should be bought out by the Government under the public sector reform programme, to bring greater rationality to the education system.

These issues cannot all be resolved over the next fortnight, but discussions can begin now. We might just have something to show for it at the start of the school year.