Overhauling  the primary school mission

The recent results of a reading initiative at Denham Town High School in Kingston underscore the urgent need for a short-term overhaul of Jamaica's primary school mission, according to this editorial. The core obligation of primary schools should be teaching children to read and do math at their age and grade levels, ending the automatic promotion of students regardless of their literacy and numeracy. The editorial calls for enforceable legislation, relevant teaching and testing regimes, and a focus on lifting reading levels in high schools. The systemic reading crisis requires a comprehensive and sustained approach to address the challenges at the early childhood and primary levels.

Addressing the reading crisis

Jamaica Gleaner/18 Dec 2023

THE EARLY results of a reading initiative at Denham Town High School in Kingston provides more than ample evidence, this newspaper believes, for an urgent, even if shortterm revamp, of the mission of Jamaica’s primary schools. Their core obligation, which must be deeply embedded in the system, must be to teach children to read and do maths at their age and grade levels. This will also mean ending the automatic promotion of children from grade to grade regardless of their literacy and numeracy.

This mission for primary school-attained literacy and numeracy must be underpinned by enforceable legislation and massively supported relevant teaching and testing regimes, against which deliverables can be measured. And while the focus of the major policy overhaul is on the primary system, it has, concomitantly, to be accompanied by a robust campaign to lift reading levels in high schools.

This project of revamping the mission of primary school is necessary in the face of the reading crisis across Jamaica’s education system, whose fix demands something far deeper than the interventions announced in October by the education minister, Fayval Williams, and aimed at 156 primary and 56 secondary schools. The issue cannot be framed as bringing literacy back to pre-COVID-19 levels, when, according to Ms Williams, it was 83 per cent. The problem to be confronted is clearly not short-term. It is systemic and flows along the stream.

NEGATIVE IMPACT

Denham Town High, where the school’s leadership has displayed courage in confronting the crisis, is a prime example of how failure at the primary level follows students along the education spectrum, blighting their ability to learn, with negative social and economic impact on the country.

Denham Town High School in west Kingston has 650 students, 96 per cent of whom – according to a report by an organisation called Creative Language Based Learning Foundation (CLBL), which has been engaged in a reading programme at the school – at the start of the last academic year, read below their grade levels. Most were below the level for entry into grade seven, the start of high school. Only 2.6 per cent of the students were considered functionally literate.

As CLBL put it, “This means that these students enter high school without being able to read.” Which is not particularly surprising.

Generally, it is estimated that up to a third of Jamaica’s children leave primary school and begin their secondary education illiterate. Two years ago, the Patterson Commission on education transformation noted that in the 2019 Primary Exit Profile exams, 56 per cent of grade-six students could not write, while 57 per cent “could not identify information in a simple sentence”.

In this year’s test, 40 per cent of the students did not meet the proficiency level in language arts. For mathematics, the figure was 53 per cent.

The tendency is for these poor-performing students, who are generally from poor, educationally challenged homes, to be concentrated in so-called non-traditional high schools, like Denham Town High, that have relatively little support, thus continuing the cycle of poor outcomes.

After an initial short pilot in late 2022, between January and June this year CLBL led a reading initiative at Denham Town High, using the Lindamood-Bell technique – developed nearly four decades ago by two American women, Patricia Lindamood, a language and speech pathologist, and Nanci Bell, a teacher – that helps students to apply various sensory techniques in making connects between sounds, letters, words and images, to improve their reading and comprehension.

During this year’s pilot, CLBL trained 19 Denham Town High teachers, at various levels, in the Lindamood-Bell method, while 64 students received interventions using the system. Another 20 students formed a control group.

What the results showed was that “with targeted instruction, non-readers begin to read within 20 hours of intense instruction”.

However, CLBL noted that with the Lindamood-Bell method, “students who receive 80-120 hours of sensory-cognitive instruction can achieve marked improvement in standard scores throughout the reading cascade”.

For instance, for students 99.5 hours of coaching, their word recognition, on testing, improved by twothirds; their spelling and accuracy improved by over 27 per cent; comprehension by more than 29 per cent; and their ability to break down words to determine the sounds, meaning and spelling improved by nearly 54 per cent. For students who had over 120 hours of instruction, their improvement, generally, was even more impressive. Word recognition was nearly 73 per cent better than when they started, while their availability to disaggregate words to reassemble for sound and spelling was up by more than 114 per cent. Their reading fluency improved by 36 per cent.

READING INITIATIVES

Given these outcomes, this newspaper supports Minister Williams’ programme to roll out various reading initiatives in primary and secondary schools, although at the high school level we feel there is a need for a broader, more aggressive programme than was implied by the minister. There is need for a mass mobilisation for high school literacy, similar to what was attempted with the JAMAL adult literacy programme of the 1970s. Professionals from all spheres can, as happened with teachers at Denham Town High, be quickly trained in the specialised delivery methods, and then allowed to contribute a few hours a week in the classrooms. In some cases, firms might even be offered incentives to allow their staff time to participate in these initiatives. For now, the primary emphasis of primary school must be teaching children to read, write, add, subtract and multiply at their grade levels. This must be rigidly applied, otherwise we get goal displacement – and huge amounts of functional illiteracy.

But ultimately, fixing the national reading crisis starts with addressing problems at the early childhood and primary levels.

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