Editorial | Good, it’s reading

Someone finally gets it. Which could mean the start of a real transformation of Jamaica’s education outcomes.

It’s reading, stupid!

So, last week, the education minister, Dana Morris Dixon, announced that reading is being formally added to the timetables of Jamaica’s primary schools, for students between grades one and three.

“Many people wouldn’t even realise that it (reading) wasn’t timetabled,” Dr Morris Dixon told a press conference to report on the implementation of the recommendations of the Patterson Commission report on education transformation.

“But now, it is being timetabled because we are serious about stemming this literacy challenge that we have in our schools,” she added.

This newspaper agrees with Dr Morris Dixon that this – giving seven to 10-year-olds at least two hours of reading and reading-related sessions each week – is a big deal.

Indeed, each year around a third of Jamaica’s children supposedly complete their primary school education largely illiterate, or close thereto. They don’t meet the standards for mastery of Language Arts in the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams.

But even these numbers mask the real depth of the crisis. In the PEP tests of 2019, 56 per cent of students couldn’t extract information from simple English sentences. Yet, English is the language of instruction in Jamaican schools.

Additionally, over 40 per cent of the grade six students fail their mathematics tests at PEP. Further, in Language Arts and maths, nearly one in 10 students perform so poorly that they are akin to being at the starting stages in the subjects, and in need of severe intervention in order to start their secondary education at grade seven.

DEFICIENCIES

These deficiencies continue into high school where over a fifth of students fail at English in the Caribbean Examination Council’s (CXC) Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, and over two-thirds fail mathematics. At the CXCs, less than 20 per cent of students pass five subjects, with maths and English among them, in a single sitting.

It is hardly surprising, in these circumstances, that fewer than three in 10 Jamaicans of the appropriate age cohort are enrolled in tertiary level education or training.

These education outcomes have, in part, an obvious and related sociological/demographic explanation.

As some top educators – as well as this newspaper – have long pointed out, although they have some facility with the language, English is not the mother tongue of most Jamaicans, especially those of the island’s poorer households. At home, and in their social interactions, they speak primarily Jamaican Patois/Creole. Their command of the intricacies of English, and therefore their grasp of the language lags their facility with Patois.

Yet, at school English, the language of the classroom, is generally taught as though it is the primary language of all students. In this environment, not only do many struggle, but are placed on an escalator that each year takes them to the next grade, regardless of how well they read and comprehend in English.

STRUGGLE

One result is the more than one-third of grade six students who struggle with Language Arts and the over 40 per cent who fail maths. A disproportionate number of this category of students are from poor households and attend primary schools in poorest rural and urban communities. They are the ones, too, who a streamed into high schools in, or close too, inner-city communities and, therefore, account for the 96 per cent of grade seven students at Denham Town High School in west Kingston, and the similar percentage at Holy Trinity in central Kingston who read well below their age and grade levels.

Happily, these two high schools have independently launched their own remedial reading programmes.

The programme announced for primary schools, if appropriately applied, has an opportunity to be transformational, by making the classrooms, and the education on offer, genuinely inclusive.

The training of teachers in the delivery of the reading curriculum, which is to happen, is important. Teachers should also have specialist support on whom they can call. And the programme must be robustly, and constantly monitored for outcomes.

Two other things must also happen. Dr Morris Dixon must turn off the escalator that carries students from grade to grade. Students should move to higher grades when they read at the grade level.

Next, the mission of primary schools must shift in this period of emergency. Their critical mission, although not the only one, must be ensuring that students are capable of reading and comprehending, and of doing sums at their age and grade levels.