Ending automatic promotions key to fixing education crisis

Jamaica’s education system faces urgent calls for reform as critics highlight the detrimental impact of automatically promoting students who lack grade-level literacy and numeracy skills. Advocates, including education officials and commentators, emphasise the need to legislate against this practice and focus on ensuring every child leaving primary school can read, comprehend, and solve basic math problems. 

SOE on primary schools

Jamaica Gleaner/16 Jan 2025

IF DANA Morris Dixon followed reports of last week’s sitting of the Westmoreland Municipal Corporation, she can be in no doubt about her urgent mission as Jamaica’s education minister.

It must be a reset of the primary objective of the island’s primary schools to ensure that no child supposedly completes primary education, at grade six, unable – but in exceptional circumstances – to read, comprehend and do sums at his or her age and grade levels.

She must ensure, too, that this obligation is underpinned by legislation, including a mandate to end the nonsense of annually automatically promoting children to higher classes, notwithstanding that they read and comprehend below their grade level.

Indeed, as part of this transformative effort, Dr Morris Dixon should impress on her boss, Prime Minister Andrew Holness, that the crisis in primary education demands that his government declares a state of emergency at that level of the system.

To be clear, giving priority to these measures does not mean that the minister must not also tackle the problems in other areas of education, including the early childhood sector. However, the primary system is in desperate need of stabilisation, lest everything else that depends on its strength collapses.

FUNCTIONAL ILLITERACY

This issue came into sharp relief at the aforementioned Westmoreland Municipal Corporation meeting, where Warren Lyttleon, the People’s National Party (PNP) representative for the Grange Hill Division, pleaded for leniency for the applicants for sanitation jobs with the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) who did not meet the agency’s basic educational standards.

It is important to put into perspective the standard that these employees do not master. According to Mark Jones, the NSWMA’S public cleansing manager for western Jamaica, they cannot read at either the grade three or four level.

Grade four, we remind, is two grades below the grade at which children, at age 11 or 12 years, are normally expected to complete primary school and are prepared for their secondary education.

“They (the prospective employees) are saying that the test is too hard, so I want you to be a little more lenient on the applicant for the job as street sweepers,” Mr Lyttleton said.

While the gravity of the situation appears to have escaped Mr Lyttleton, the depth of functional illiteracy in Jamaica that it highlights is not surprising. Neither is it the first time the problem of reading and comprehension among Jamaican workers has been noted by this newspaper.

MAJOR INTERVENTIONS

Last March, for instance, The Gleaner commented on an anecdote on the question highlighted in a column by the anthropologist and commentator Don Robotham.

An evaluation of employees at a well-known but unnamed firm, Professor Robotham noted, found that, generally, the literacy level of these workers was at grade five and that they were “particularly weak in their reading skills”.

All of these workers had completed high school. But that, too, is not surprising. A remedial reading project at Denham Town High School two years ago discovered that 96 per cent read below their age and grade levels – many substantially so.

But what might we expect when annually, more than a third who are assessed in their final year of primary school do not meet the competency standard in language arts and 40 per cent fail at maths. Around seven per cent of these students are so far behind that they are considered at the“beginner’s stage” of primary education and in need of major interventions to bring them up to speed.

These weaknesses carry over to the secondary system, and is more pronounced at institutions in poor communities, like Denham Town High, and translates to the results in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams, where nearly a quarter (23.6 per cent in 2024) of Jamaican students failed at English. Twothirds failed maths.

NATIONAL EMERGENCY

Reading is the obvious problem. If children cannot read and comprehend, and grasp nuances, in the language of instruction, it is unlikely they will fully understand what is taught in other subjects.

Yet, children who struggle with English, and many other subjects, as the results of the grade six Primary Exit Profile exams insistently confirm, are kept on this escalator that takes them from grade to grade, even if little is being learnt.

Jamaica has to find radically new ways to teach in English to students to whom the language is not the primary one used in their homes and communities. Or perhaps return to ways of old, when it was assumed that proficiency in English was universal.

In this respect, Jamaica needs not reinvent the wheel to address the crisis. We have the examples of several southern US states which were faced with similar problems but advanced creative solutions.

First though, Jamaica has to accept that it faces a crisis – a national emergency – that requires mobilisation similar to the JAMAL adult literacy programme of the 1970s. The deliverable: no child must leave primary school unable to read, write and do sums. The rest will be add-ons.

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