Editorial | Get into the CXC data

Like Minister Fayval Williams, and others in the education establishment, this newspaper welcomes all positives in Jamaica’s education outcomes, including those in this year’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) exams.

In this regard, we join the minister in celebrating that of 46,727 students who actually did the CSEC tests, approximately 77 per cent passed at least one subject, achieving the recognised grades one, two, or three. In nine (26 per cent) of 34 subjects, the pass rate was 80 per cent or higher.

Further, in an environment where girls have, for decades, consistently outperformed boys in education, it was worth noting, as Ms Williams highlighted, that boys did better than girls in four CSEC subjects: additional maths (males 65.6 per cent, females 64.8 per cent); music (males 83.1 per cent, females 75.9 per cent); principles of business (males 82.7 per cent, females 82.4 per cent); and theatre arts (males 78.8 per cent, females 77.9 per cent). At the CAPE level, males also outperformed females, mostly marginally, in seven subjects in which the pass rates – but for two, green engineering and supply chain operations – the overall passes were above 90 per cent.

“Those are good percentages for our males, and we want to encourage them along in these various subject areas,” Ms Williams said. So does The Gleaner. For while we have absolutely no problem with high female achievement, Jamaica faces a deepening crisis in male underperformance in education. Perhaps there are lessons to be extrapolated in these results of how to do things.

INDUCE BLINDERS

We, however, have to be careful about how we speak about these outcomes to induce blinders. Although the minister stated that “challenges and concerns” remained in the education system and pointed to areas of underperformance in these exams, the general tone of the review, we feel, underplayed the depth of the problem, even as revealed by the CSEC and CAPE figures.

Two results in the exams underlined the crisis and the ongoing struggle of Jamaican students with maths and English, critical core subjects in Jamaica’s education. Of the 21,808 students (95 per cent of those who registered) who actually wrote the English exam, 69.9 per cent received passing grades. That was a 3.4 per cent decline from last year. With respect to mathematics, the pass rate was 37.2 per cent of the 19,886 students who did the test, a drop of 5.2 per cent from a year earlier.

We appreciate that a difficult teaching and learning environment over the past two years, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, may have impacted students’ achievements. However, the maths and English figures are not untypical of the historic yo-yo-like performance in these subjects. Indeed, there is a straight line to these results from those of grade-six students – as was highlighted by the Patterson Commission on education transformation – a third of whom end their primary education largely illiterate. Indeed, in 2019, 57 per cent of these 12-year-old students could not extract information from simple English sentences. A similar proportion could hardly write.

PASS RATE

It is noted, too, that education ministry officials tend to emphasise the pass rate of students who are successful in at least one subject in the exams. However, the base matriculation standard for tertiary-level education is generally five subjects, of which maths and English should be among them. How many Jamaican students achieved that standard in this year’s CSEC exams is not clear from the data so far published by the education ministry. Generally, though, around 40 per cent of students pass five CSEC subjects, including maths or English, at a single sitting. This figure usually falls to below 30 per cent if maths and English are among the subjects passed.

Additionally, the public would benefit from the education ministry’s perspective on the CSEC results based on subject entries (161,496 registrations, of which 149,998 actually wrote the exams, with a pass rate of 65.8 per cent) when compared to the number of students who registrated and those who sat the exams. This disaggregation of the data is important, and urgent, for stakeholders who are keen to contribute to fixing the problems in education. While there is no cause to believe that there is wilful or malign intent in the slow roll-out of the information, the delay, given the ease with which information can be extracted for analysis, is frustrating.

In the context of the Patterson Commission’s report, and the beginning of efforts to implement its recommendations, the exam results are worthy of robust analysis and debate. For the clearer Jamaicans are about the story they tell, the better informed the decisions they make are likely to be.