Editorial | A vision for the JTA

Leighton Johnson’s ambition of returning teaching to a profession that attracts Jamaica’s best and brightest deserves full embrace.

But as the new president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) will appreciate, fulfilling that aspiration cannot be the responsibility only of the Government. And won’t be achieved by merely wishing for it, or allocating more to education, including paying teachers more without measurable returns on the investment.

In other words, the JTA, in its role as trade union and professional organisation, should offer specific proposals to translate these ideas to concrete deliverables, rather than its habit of making loose declarations.

In that regard, Mr Johnson should do things; he should make transforming the JTA into an organisation of thought, ideas and educational leadership the key mission during the year of his presidency; and he should convince Mark Smith, who will become president next August, to also embrace this mandate.

It was in his inaugural speech that Mr Johnson laid out his vision of the reconfigured teacher.

“[W]e must improve our approach in marketing the teaching profession as an attractive and viable option to the youths of our nation,” Mr Johnson said. “I suggest that we embark on a national campaign to fill our teachers’ colleges with creative and agile thinkers who have the ability to inspire this generation, [because] the teaching profession requires the best and brightest minds.”

REQUIRE A SHIFT

This would require a shift from what Mr Johnson perceives as the Government’s strategy of replacing teachers, rather than seek to retain them in the system.

“ [T]his can be achieved only through an improved compensation package. This can only be achieved if we give our teachers what they truly deserve,” he said.

Jamaica has for decades suffered a haemorrhage of its most qualified teachers. They have headed to better-paying jobs in the private sector or have been recruited to foreign classrooms, especially in Britain and the United States, to help fill their own teacher shortages.

Indeed, it was a matter for the education minister, Fayval Williams, to preen about last month in reporting that resignations from schools for the year up to July had fallen by 72 per cent when compared to 2022 – 427 against 1,538. This year’s resignations represented approximately 1.7 per cent of the teachers in the public school system, compared to 6.2 per cent last year.

While significant pay hikes as part of the Government’s reclassification of public-sector jobs might have slowed the exodus, some JTA officials have warned that Ms Williams’ number is perhaps an undercount – the extent of which will become apparent when the new school year begins in September. Moreover, the losses are likely to be greatest in specialised areas, particularly among teachers of mathematics, science and technical subjects.

Questions of class sizes, the physical environment in which many teachers have to work and the dysfunctional behaviour of many students are among the real issues to be addressed. And perhaps, too, as the JTA insists, that even with the recent hikes, teachers are not being paid enough.

OTHER FACTORS

But there are other factors that should be part of the debate, not least of which is the responsibility teachers should take for educational outcomes and if, and how, they should be held accountable for their deliverables.

For instance, a 2019 World Bank/UNESCO analysis found that while Jamaica outclassed its Caribbean peers on the proportion of gross domestic product (5.2 per cent, compared to 4.9 per cent) and the national Budget (19 per cent as against 15 per cent) allocated to education, Jamaica has far worse educational outcomes.

Each year, up to a third of students leave Jamaica’s primary schools functionally illiterate. Forty per cent of these 12-year-olds require pre-high-school interventions in language arts, and 51 per cent in maths, for them to be able to properly absorb secondary education. Additionally, even after significant screening by most schools to eliminate weak students, fewer than three in 10 of those who sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams pass five subjects, inclusive of maths and English, at a single sitting. A bit over four in 10 do pass five or more subjects, but for many, maths and English are not among their passes.

As the 2021 Patterson Commission report highlighted, and earlier task forces found, Jamaica’s education system is far from equitable. There is a group of relatively well-endowed high schools that predominantly serve the better-prepared children of people of better economic circumstances. Then there is the multitude of poor-performing ones that serve mostly poorer children.

These are issues to be resolved. The JTA ought to be in the vanguard of these debates, which must be robust, ongoing and public. The perception of the association, however, is that its interventions are, at best, sporadic, and focused primarily on issues of salaries and welfare.

It is not this newspaper’s sense that the JTA has a large, transformative vision for education. Maybe it is voluble behind closed doors, but its public interventions, such as on the Patterson Report, are wanting. Nor has the association been willing to engage on the question of performance-based compensation, supposedly on the premise that no such system could be designed for Jamaica.

Mr Johnson has an opportunity to change the trajectory of the JTA.