Editorial | Now to reading, minister

Fayval Williams has not made a formal announcement about the scheme. It has, however, seeped out that the education minister has approved a plan for schools whose intake of grade-seven students are ill-prepared for secondary education to use their first year in high school for remediation and socialisation efforts.

The idea sounds broadly similar to something that Denham Town High School in west Kingston has apparently been doing unofficially for much of the past year, but with broader application. Their efforts at catch-up, it has been reported, go beyond grade seven.

If Minister Williams has indeed placed her imprimatur on such a programme, she deserves the full support of all stakeholders in the education project, including parents who may be concerned that their children may be held back. Which, in the end, is better than students being kept on a conveyor belt to failure.

Yet, as this newspaper advised previously, Ms Williams must do something far more radical now if, over the short term, she is to arrest the problem she wants to tackle with her latest high-school intervention. What the minister must then do is urgently and fundamentally reshape the mission of primary schools, to focus on reading and mathematics. In three years’ time, she must insist that absolutely NO child should complete grade six – which usually is around age 12 – and headed for high school without being able to read, or do sums, at his or her grade level.

This will call for ending the system of automatically promoting students to higher grades, even when they do not read at those grade levels. This new approach must be underpinned by legislation, which Ms Williams ought to take to Parliament immediately.

PEP ANALYSIS

While Minister Williams’ immediate attention is a deepening crisis in Jamaica’s high schools, its genesis, clearly, is in the primary system. Indeed, on average, around a third of students end their primary education, even if they may appear to be able to read, functionally illiterate.

Take, for instance, this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams of grade-six students, which determines students’ readiness for secondary schooling and is used to guide high-school placements. Just over 36,000 students did the tests. In language arts, 40 per cent (over 14,000) did not meet the standard for proficiency, including seven per cent, or 2,500 students, who would need intensive academic support in grade seven. Another 33 per cent, or nearly 12,000 students, would need “targeted academic support”, based on the education ministry assessment guidelines.

With respect to mathematics, 47 per cent of the students met the proficiency standards. Looked at another way, 53 per cent (more than 19,000) did not.

The education ministry has not yet offered a deeper analysis of this year’s PEP data. However, the exams emphasise critical thinking rather than rote learning among children. But in 2019, as Orlando Patterson’s commission on the reform of the education system noted in its report two years ago: “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.”

In other words, these students lack the critical foundation for absorbing secondary education. Very cruelly, the sad outcomes highlighted in the Patterson Report were predictable long before grade six, as students were moved from grade to grade, and subjected to periodic, short-term interventions – usually over the summer holidays.

THE ‘MISSISSIPPI MIRACLE’

Several American states, mostly in the country’s south, faced a similar crisis. They have been turning it around.

Mississippi, as we have spotlighted several times, was one of them. Indeed, these days, when Mississippi is referred to with respect to education, it is generally to talk about the so-called ‘Mississippi miracle’.

A decade ago, the state was among the worst in the USA for reading outcomes among grade-four students. In 2022, of America’s 50 states, it was 21st – and continuing on an upward trajectory.

This is making a difference to high-school performance. At the start of 2010, Mississippi graduated only three-quarters of its high-school students. The figure is now over 90 per cent – and rising.

What Mississippi, and several other states with similar problems did, was to take their children off the promotion treadmill, and backed up the system with law. So, students had to read at the appropriate grade levels before being promoted. These changes were also buttressed by new teaching techniques, consistent interventions, and tough oversight.

The fundamental mission of primary education was changed. It went back to basics.

Children who cannot read or communicate adequately in the language of instruction cannot absorb their education. They will not be able to extract ideas and information from simple sentences.

So, while we fully support the remedial efforts at high school, urgent crisis-mode action is demanded at the primary level.

What Mississippi did is not beyond Jamaica, or outside of the scope of the national education transformation project.

Ms Williams must act NOW!