EDITORIAL - An absence of shame

Dr Claude Packer is right. The Mico University College can't just move on from the Doran Dixon affair.

For, as Dr Packer, The Mico president, says, Mr Dixon compromised the brand of the institution at which he is a lecturer. Indeed, the decent thing for Mr Dixon to do is to publicly concede that he is incapable of sustaining a defence of his action and apologise to The Mico as well as the education minister, Mr Ronald Thwaites.

Similarly, Mr Paul Adams, the principal of Herbert Morrison High School, should admit to having not only embarrassed himself, but brought the reputation of the institution into disrepute.

Indeed, it is for the board of Herbert Morrison to determine whether it can maintain confidence in their principal in the absence of an unambiguous apology or fundamental exculpatory explanation in the speech he plans to deliver tomorrow in Trelawny. The latter course seems unlikely.

Messrs Dixon and Adams, we remind, are former presidents of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), the trade union for the island's nearly 27,000 publicly paid teachers. Mr Dixon is currently a senior lecturer and departmental head at The Mico, an institution that trains teachers.

Both men have presided over a union whose members run an education system whose performance is awful, but consumes a quarter - J$75 billion - of the Government's non-debt expenditure.

About 20 per cent of the students who enter secondary school at grade seven leave by grade nine, and of those who remain, half are screened out of the CXC secondary-school exams at grade 11. Of those who do the tests, no more than 16 per cent pass five subjects at a single sitting, including English and maths. Of all the students who write these exams, more than 60 per cent fail maths and 40 per cent English.

Such outcomes can't continue if Jamaica is to become a viable, competitive economy. But teachers and their union have resisted change, especially anything that hints at measuring their performance and holding them accountable.

Further, the JTA struggles against any attempt to remove privileges, no matter how blatantly unaffordable: like the 40 days a year in holidays that teachers are entitled to after two years on the job, or the one-year study leave at full pay.

reasonable adjustments

Mr Thwaites has proposed reasonable adjustments to these schemes, which currently cost the Government J$2.5 billion a year for substitute teachers. This is against the backdrop of Jamaica's public debt of 140 per cent of gross domestic product and demands from the International Monetary Fund for economic austerity.

But rather than informed, persuasive and intellectual discourse, Mr Dixon likened the education minister to a "mongrel dog" for daring to declare the truth. Mr Adams suggested that the minister's declarations were akin to someone on drugs.

If Mr Dixon's statement is illustrative of how he intellectually engages his students, we shudder at the thought of the quality of analytical and pedagogic skills teacher trainees from The Mico emerge with. The hope is that the students have countervailing influences.

We wonder, too, at the discipline and performance at Herbert Morrison and the example Mr Adams believes his conduct offers to his students.

The JTA seems not to be perturbed by the dismal education outcomes or the boorish behaviour of its key leaders. The teachers' union has abrogated its responsibility for leadership.

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