EDITORIAL - We hope Ms Molloy proves us wrong

Ms Nadine Molloy was on Tuesday installed as the president of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) and immediately set out upon a route that seems likely to lead to confirmation of our worst fear: that she will be like every other recent leader of the organisation.

That is to say, we expect nothing expansive or transformational from the teachers union during Ms Molloy's presidency. The JTA will give no quarter on the big issues of day, especially on the matter of holding teachers accountable for performance and rewarding them, in part, on the basis of educational outcomes.

We would be happy, though, for Ms Molloy to prove us wrong by displaying a capacity for expansive thinking and dynamic leadership. Her inaugural speech, however, provides the basis for our pessimism. She acknowledges that Jamaica's education system is a mess and makes the obligatory and cursory call for teachers to be professional so as not to provide "fodder to those who would find it easy to blame us".

But she was not beyond doing some blaming herself - of the Government and the education minister which, in the current circumstances, means Mr Andrew Holness.

Economic crisis

Ms Molloy, for example, says that Jamaica's education budget translates to between US$314 and US$460 per student, or half the per capita expenditure of some of its Caribbean neighbours.

"The fact is, you earn what you spend," she said. Which, we presume, is another way of saying that we can benchmark the performance of students by how much money is spent on their education. We have no fundamental quarrel with that argument.

However, it cannot have escaped Ms Molloy and the JTA that Jamaica faces an economic crisis, has little to spend and must insist on the best returns on what it spends, including its investment in education. There are very few people in Jamaica, except perhaps teachers, who believe that we get good value for money in education.

If teachers are not doing well, it is because of classroom sizes, not sufficient specialised training and a generally deficiency in resources, according to Ms Molloy. "Therefore, Minister, again, you must take responsibility for schools that have been labelled failures."

No retreat, no surrender

But even as she made these observations and called for "minimum standards" of facilities and student-teacher ratios in the pre-primary and primary levels, Ms Molloy was insisting that there should be "no retreat, no surrender on not one single" gain that has accrued to teachers by the hard negotiations of the JTA. These, we suppose, include the $7 billion in back-pay still owed to teachers under the professional job upgrading programme, but whose payment was unilaterally, and wrongfully, frozen by the Government.

This newspaper had no problem with the pay adjustments, or even the fact that the JTA might be willing to entertain a proposal that the balance go towards some of the necessary upgrades to which Ms Molloy pointed. Indeed, $7 billion could hire more than a few teachers.

However, Ms Molloy could end the JTA's reflexive opposition to performance-based pay and voluntarily make it a compact with its employer and other stakeholders in the education system.

Fundamental transformation often demands courage of leaders, Ms Molloy.

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