Peter Espeut | A failing education system

I must begin by declaring interest: I was board chairman for Holy Trinity Secondary School in 1994; it became a Comprehensive High School in 1995, and when I demitted office in 2000 it had become Holy Trinity High School. Through all this time (and before) it was sent by the Ministry of Education a grade-seven cohort which was largely illiterate.

This week on public radio, I heard the current principal of Holy Trinity, the Reverend Father Carl Clarke, state that in this academic year, 75 per cent of their Grade 7 intake reads below what is expected of a Grade-four primary school student, and a good number of those are reading at pre-primary level, that is to say, they cannot read at all!

In a follow-up interview, the minister of education described more than a quarter of Jamaica’s secondary institutions (like Holy Trinity) as “failing schools”.

Campion College, my alma mater, is, of course, not a failing school. To get in you must obtain 98 per cent in the government’s primary exit profile (PEP) examination. Dozens of Rhodes scholars and Jamaica scholars have come from Campion over the decades.

I’ll take a bet that since its inception in 1960, not one student has entered Campion College reading below the grade-four level.

Of course, Holy Trinity High is not really a failing school. They work miracles with the under-performing and non-performing students they are sent by the Ministry of Education. Father Carl estimates that by third form the school is able to move the reading performance of most of their low-performing readers up by three or four grade levels. In terms of value-added, Holy Trinity ranks as a high-performing school.

LOW LEVEL LITERATES

It is the primary schools that send their illiterate and low-level literates to schools like Holy Trinity that deserve a low ranking. How can a student go to primary school for six years (often after three years of infant or basic school) and still cannot read at even the grade-one level?

The 2021 Patterson Report on Education Transformation, and before that the 2004 Rae Davis Report, identified the Jamaican education system as failing. Page 50 of the Patterson Report states that in 2015 the National Education Inspectorate evaluated “55 per cent of the nation’s schools as ineffective”. In 2018 the performance gap between public and private schools in mathematics at grade four was 24 percentage points (page 53). No wonder parents that can afford it send their children to private prep schools rather than government primary schools!

The 2019 PEP results “indicated that most students were barely literate”; “33 per cent cannot read or can barely do so”; “56 per cent cannot write or barely”; “58 per cent cannot find info on a topic or barely” (page 63). Page 64 shows a gender disparity in PEP performanc. In mathematics, 66 per cent of boys and 51 per cent of girls fail; in science, 57 per cent of boys and 44 per cent of girls fail; in language arts, 55 per cent of males and 35 per cent of females fail; and in social studie, 50 per cent of boys and 37 per cent of girls fail.

In 2018 the World Bank Human Capital Project found that in Jamaica there is a “learning crisis of high enrolment and poor performance”. By age 18, Jamaican children can expect to have spent 11.7 years in the classroom, with only 7.2 years of effective schooling; on average, 4.5 years of classroom time is wasted!

Jamaica’s primary school system is broken, and schools like Holy Trinity High are left to pick up the pieces, by spending thousands of secondary teaching hours doing remedial primary schooling.

The Patterson Report is now two years old, and has not been tabled in Parliament, nor made subject to a review of a committee of the House. An implementation committee has been appointed; it may be meeting, but the public is unaware of its deliberations; the government has not initiated public debate on the report’s findings. Things largely remain the same.

SPENT BILLIONS ON BACKEND

Instead of fixing the problem on the frontend, improving early-childhood and primary education, since the publication of the Patterson Report, the Government has spent billions on the backend – on a new programme shunting non-performing secondary graduates into remedial and vocational pathways. Because the source of the problem remains unaddressed, there will always be illiterates (mostly boys) passing out of primary and secondary schools, ready to be recruited by gangs and scammers.

“If you can read this, thank a teacher” is a well-known slogan. But if you can’t read, who do you blame? The Ministry of Education is too quick to blame “failing schools”. In my view it is the Ministry of Education – and a succession of ministers of education – who are failing; that have failed; and have been failing over many decades.

Since Independence either there has been no serious political will to improve educational performances, or successive administrations are guilty of the grossest incompetence in doing so. What do you think?

High literacy levels and good examination results in our CARICOM counterparts show that it can be done. We have preferred to provide the sugar industry and other sectors with low-level unskilled labour rather than up-skill our labour force towards transforming our economy for the twenty-first century.

I wish Father Clarke well in his efforts at Holy Trinity High. I taught him in fourth form at St. George’s College, and I know that he chose teaching as a profession long after his ordination as a Catholic priest, not because he had no options, but because he wants to make a difference in his country of birth.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com