Editorial | JTA’s real mandate

It seems that what we hoped for from last week’s annual conference of the Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA) did not materialise: a deliberative affair that analysed and proffered solutions to the crisis facing Jamaica’s failing education system. By which we mean the JTA’s leadership having more than a public grouse about pay and conditions in the classroom.

A critical part of its mission is getting to the crux of why Jamaica has such poor education outcomes and how the problem might be fixed.

Last week’s conference was a perfect opportunity for the JTA to adapt, or return to conducting its affairs in a thoughtful, constructive manner.

It is a year since Orlando Patterson’s commission issued its report on education transformation, to which the association is yet to offer a substantive and coherent response.

Indeed, if the JTA has formulated positions on the commission’s report and recommendations, and these were subject to debate by delegates, it was either very much in secret, or the entire Jamaica media were incompetent, or flagrantly irresponsible for not reporting on it.

It is unlikely that the latter was the case. In which event, La Sonja Harrison, installed as president at the conference, was not entirely to blame, given the JTA’s byzantine and hydra-headed leadership structure, which perhaps constrains a president’s ability to advance, and pursue, innovative ideas. Unless that leader comes to the job with a sense of mission and willingness, if required, to bulldoze her, or his, way through.

OTHER IDEAS

Hopefully, Mrs Harrison has ideas other than those she articulated at the conference and brings to her leadership that aforementioned sense of mission.

We know from Mrs Harrison’s various remarks at the conference that:

• She is against the Jamaica Teaching Council Bill, which is now before Parliament, believing it to be oppressive and can be used to throw large numbers of teachers with traditional teachers’ college training out of the profession;

• She is unhappy with the finance ministry’s approach to the public sector’s job and salary reclassification project, feeling that the process is not sufficiently transparent.

“Though invited to two sessions deemed consultations, some of our questions and requests have been denied to date,” Mrs Harrison said. “We are unsure if this is a case of delaying tactics, though it was emphatically stated at the outset that this is not a negotiation. That stance alone is instructive. Is this the beginning of the elimination of the bargaining process?”

• She agrees that emerging artificial intelligence (AI) systems will have a place in classrooms, but is wary that some may feel it possible to displace human teachers with technology, and warned about how AI is imported into Jamaica’s classroom. Said Mrs Harrison: “As midwives of the education system here in Jamaica, we must ensure that this (human teachers) remains our reality. Nothing can, and should, replace the teacher here in Jamaica … . As an association, we further support the position that all teachers should be properly trained and consulted, re the use of said technologies … . Let us be awakened to the larger picture, to think global while we remain authentically Jamaican.”

These, of course, are legitimate, and in some cases, immediate matters of concern for a teachers’ organisation. But the JTA has for a long time taken a largely binary approach to education – salary and working conditions for teachers – rather than a broader, multifaceted attack on systemic failings.

BROADER ISSUES ON EDUCATION

We know that the performance of the education system, despite an expenditure of five per cent of GDP on it, is in many respects abysmal. A third of students leave primary school illiterate. Nearly six in 10 of grade-six students cannot write or identify information in simple English sentences.

At the secondary level, only 42 per cent of the students who take the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams pass five subjects in a single sitting, and only 28 per cent of the students are also successful in both mathematics and English in the sitting in which they pass the five subjects.

The Patterson Commission proposed a raft of measures – ranging from the funding of early-childhood education to the structure of the education ministry and how teachers are trained – to address these shortcomings. Thus far, only the proposed teachers’ council law, whose genesis is in a previous report of nearly two decades ago, has publicly animated the JTA.

Mrs Harrison must bring the JTA to the forefront of a public discourse on the Patterson Report and other issues on education, telling stakeholders what it supports and with what it disagrees – and why. And what are its alternatives to the bits it finds problematic.

However, putting the JTA in a position where the leader can pursue groundbreaking initiatives and engage in meaningful discourse, rather than merely addressing its base trade union function of salary negotiations, might require a restructuring of an organisation that at the same time has three potentially competing centres of power – the sitting president, the immediate past president, and a president-elect. They all, each year, move seamlessly from one post to the next to sustain this leadership triumvirate. The sitting president, in pursuing initiatives, is looking forward and backwards, perhaps, for the vindication (or the dagger) of the others. That is an unsustainable way to govern.