EDITORIAL - Leslie Riley and street-smart education

It is possible that his email username, johnnylegger@yahoo.com, is aimed at indicating he is pulling our legs. Otherwise, Leslie Riley has engaged in a piece of defensive diatribe that is all too common among Jamaica's teachers and their trade union, the Jamaica Teachers' Association.

Mr Riley is principal of the Marcus Garvey Technical High School in St Ann which, in a letter published by this newspaper yesterday, he described as one of the island's "largest upgraded technical high schools". He agreed that an "inordinately high number of students" in the so-called upgraded high schools "fail mathematics and English as core subjects".

But this poor performance, the goodly Mr Riley insisted, could not accurately be deemed as representative of "failure of the education system".

Said Principal Riley: "A big mistake often made by researchers into performance of the system is to use Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination passes as the index of academic success."

He brands people's celebration of passes in a large number of subjects at CSEC as a "fixation" that discounts "competence which comes with maturity, readiness and aptitude".

Distorted reasoning

Of course, Mr Riley, the uncharitable might claim, entirely and deliberately misses the point and has engaged in the kind of distorted reasoning that he ascribes to others. We assume no motive.

The point is, there can be only a handful of people in Jamaica who would, at this point, be judging education outcomes on passes in a "large number of subjects", whatever Mr Riley presumes to mean by this. Most of us would be happy, for now, if more than a fifth of the examination cohort could pass five subjects at CSEC in a single sitting, if passes in math could be lifted to 50 per cent, and if that in English were even up to 70 per cent.

Our own position notwithstanding, what is not clear from Principal Riley's treatise is what outcomes people have a right to expect from students who attend upgraded technical high schools, where examination passes are well below the inordinately poor national averages. If workers can't read, add or subtract, they are unlikely to be able to read instructions, or measure things and bring the ultimate value to the job market in the ongoing learning process that Headmaster Riley presumes to be the norm.

Good test of performance

While we agree that the number of passes in exams is not the sole measure of educational outcomes or individual talent, it remains a good standardised test of performance. To assume that the vast majority of our children can't attain these standards, even in the context of "learning as an ongoing process", appears to be a cop-out - the building of straw men to avoid accountability.

Frankly, we find it offensive to our top performers, who pass 10 or more subjects at CSEC, that Mr Riley would characterise them as "without the ability to transfer knowledge into job creation" in part, because they are "not street-smart, a necessary skill for survival".

Are we to assume that such students pass several subjects because of an inability to think, and that the real value a citizen brings to the society is his street smarts? Balderdash, Headmaster Riley.