Editorial | Radical action on reading

Fayval Williams, the education minister, must provide an unvarnished report of the annual summer programme aimed at bringing underperforming grade-four and pre-high-school students up to basics.

Hopefully, it achieved success and that the 28,000 students who were targeted for the in-person and online classes will read and comprehend, and add and subtract better when they enter grade five and grade seven (high school) in September, than would otherwise have been the case.

Nonetheless, this should be the last of these annual initiatives of the education system playing catch-up – attempting to bring children up to speed on concepts and ideas and knowledge they should have grasped grades earlier.

Instead, Ms Williams should reshape the mission of the primary education system. It must be absolute that no student must end grade six, and ‘graduate’ from primary school, without being fully proficient in language arts and mathematics. The system of the annual automatic promotion of students – deficiencies notwithstanding – must end.

Furthermore, the underperforming students who are already in high school should be appropriately, and sensitively, screened and not be promoted until they are able to read at their grade levels.

In other words, this is an invitation for Ms Williams, and the Government more broadly, to frontally acknowledge (as opposed to doing so almost as an academic exercise) the crisis in education in Jamaica and do something radical about it.

In her column in today’s paper, Minister Williams noted that Jamaica’s education system needs a massive overhaul, which will require a strong public-private partnership to undertake the critical transformation process if we are to achieve the objective of quality education for our youth. This newspaper supports that view.

A full public discussion of the Orlando Patterson commission report on transforming education and beginning the implementation of the many good ideas in it, including its call for a focus on the pre-primary and early-childhood sectors, is necessary. The minister has noted that the Government is well advanced in completing a blueprint for the transformation of the existing system, consistent with recommendations from the commission.

ADDED URGENCY

There is an added urgency to the situation in primary schools, which children generally attend to age 11 or 12, or until they reach grade six. Thereafter, they undergo the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams – an assessment of their readiness for secondary schooling, on the basis of performance in a national standardised test and in-class performance. Critically, the PEP results determine to which secondary institutions students are streamed: the elite ‘traditional’ high schools, where outcomes are generally better, or the newer ‘upgraded’ high schools.

Started in 2019, PEP, more so than its predecessors, emphasises analytical thinking. The results this year were an improvement on the earlier exams. Even so, of the 36,105 students who did the exams, only 60 per cent were proficient, or highly proficient, in language arts. Put another way, 40 per cent fell below the standard, including seven per cent who, on the basis of the education ministry’s assessment formula, would need intensive academic support in grade seven. That is more than 2,500 students. Additionally, nearly 12,000 students (33 per cent) would need “targeted academic support” in language arts after the transition to high school.

With respect to mathematics, 47 per cent of the students met the standard for proficiency, which means more than half (53 per cent) did not. That included four per cent who will require very intensive support to bring them up to par.

Ms Williams’ ministry has not as yet provided a deep analysis of the PEP outcomes, but the Patterson Commission, in its review of the 2019 results, underlined the depth of the crisis. It said, “A breakdown of the language arts results indicated that a third of students at the end of primary school could not read, 56 per cent could not write, and 57 per cent could not identify information in a simple sentence.” Which, of course, is the basis of education founded in analytic thinking and the foundation of a modern economy. That starts with children being able to read, write, comprehend what they read, and, thereby, being able to manipulate information. Then there is the issue of them being able to do their sums.

THE ‘MISSISSIPPI MIRACLE’

In Jamaica, the foundation is crumbly. The grade-four literacy and numeracy tests identify thousands of students who are en route to the grade-six outcomes that the education ministry annually scrambles to correct ahead of children entering high school.

Primary education needs to resurrect, and reassert, its mission. Which starts with insisting that children must be able to read and do maths at their age and grade levels.

In that regard, we again commend to Minister Williams the transformation in education that has been happening in several southern US states, and especially to the ‘Mississippi Miracle’.

A decade ago, Mississippi was the second-worst state for reading by grade-four students in America. In 2022 it was the 21st – and rising – of the 50 states. It used to be that only three-quarters of Mississippi’s students graduated high school. It is now closer to 90 per cent. Reading and maths test scores are rising.

What Mississippi and other southern states did was to pass laws that prevented the automatic promotion of students who did not read at their grade level. They supported the legislation with appropriate in- and out-of-class interventions. Mississippi also introduced new techniques to teach children to read. None of this is beyond Jamaica.

The other thing Mississippi did was to frontally admit that it faced a crisis. And it framed the problem in those terms, which allowed it to get back to basics. Jamaica must.