Education: call to action

Martin Henry, Contributor

Crime is out of control. The justice system is clogged with a backlog of 400,000-plus cases. The secondary road network is in decay. The country is heading towards a serious water crisis. And we have amassed a debt burden which is nearly 150 per cent of GDP.

Going back to that (in)famous World Bank loan of 1966 "to develop secondary schools, and post-secondary institutions for teacher training, technical and agricultural education", 'education' has been one of the main, if not the principal, beneficiary of contracted loans. The budget for that programme was overshot by 100 per cent, it was riddled with corruption, and it became a major part of the investigations of the DaCosta commission of enquiry set up by the PNP Government of Michael Manley in 1972 only months after replacing the JLP administration.

Not only was that loan badly spent, it was used to create the junior secondary school which is at the root of the inequalities among school types now seen at the secondary level. At $75 billion, education, this year, takes 14.6% of the $512-billion total budget. That moves up to more than a quarter (26%) of the what-lef' Budget after debt payments.

A strong case can be made that we are spending too much on education. Which means short-changing other sectors, including sectors like security and justice, which are at the base of state responsibility to citizens and which cannot be devolved to other parties.

There is a near universal magical belief that education will drive national development, never mind that the Jamaican economy remains flat and debt-ridden despite the massive 'investment' in education. In any case, some 85% of the beneficiaries of the investment at the tertiary level emigrate.

Perhaps we should invest more in law and order and security, justice and human rights, public infrastructure, the operations of government itself in the efficient delivery of state services, in currency stabilisation and tax reduction as both ends in themselves for the well-being of citizens and as known stimuli for growth. This growth would exert a demand pull for more and better education which more people could pay for on their own account, or which the State could better afford to offer.

But, for the moment, this is a proposition in theoretical abstraction. So let's focus on the return on 'investment'. The minister of education, Ronald Thwaites', "call to action" in the Sectoral Debate set out to do just that, but has been sidelined into a quarrel by the loud teachers' union. "The returns on all this investment are not good enough," the minister told Parliament and the country.

"We cannot continue to accept mediocrity; to be satisfied with so-called graduations at all types of schools where half the students have not attained the required standard. This is a call to action. We can determine how to spend the education budget more purposefully; to avoid the systematic waste, and to change entitlements that we cannot afford. This is a call to action."

Teachers' unions wield enormous power over education policy in many places in the interest of their members. The teachers' union here has, historically, shall we say, enjoyed a special relationship with the PNP going all the way back to the founding of the party in 1938 from a conglomeration of pre-existing civil-society groups. There is that Senate seat for the teachers/JTA, like the one for the farmers/JAS.

The boisterous response to Thwaites' propositions for adjusting Government/teachers' arrangements underlies a deep sense of betrayal that the gains made by teachers are about to be eroded by a minister in a government formed by the party to which the teachers' union has been aligned from day one.

Preserve status quo

The resolution to appeal to the prime minister to address the JTA annual conference in August, instead of the minister, and to rein in Minister Thwaites, who seems blind and insensitive to the history and the runnings, is rooted in this alignment. So, the party leader/prime minister ought to come to the rescue, preserving the status quo, even if that has to be at the expense of the revolution for upgrading education performance.

But Minister Thwaites must also understand that the 'unaffordable' benefits and 'entitlements' which teachers are fighting tooth and nail to retain, were not handouts but negotiated exchanges for hard cash payments in salaries which could not be afforded.

The Finland model and others which work much better than ours have been rolled out in this latest iteration of the Great Education Debate. In all the successful models, two critical teacher factors prevail: Teachers are drawn from the brightest and the best and are highly educated, and teachers are well paid. Neither holds for Jamaica.

A hodgepodge, low-performance, inequitable, teacher-centred education system which wastes the vast majority of the nation's children and youth has developed, led by our politics. Change will involve some painful adjustments. The teachers' union, as only one of several stakeholders and not even the most important one - the children, unorganised and largely voiceless, are - must not be allowed to control or derail positive change. A labour union must not be allowed to dictate education policy.

And the JTA lion, as Ronnie shrewdly senses, is not nearly as powerful as its boisterous roaring would suggest. Ronnie's greatest risk factor is not the JTA, as such, but political interference from within on behalf of the teachers and in defence of their special place in the old order. One very experienced senior journalist at the minister's media meeting privately expressed his fear of a Cabinet pushback.

Minister Thwaites said his presentation reflected collaborative effort within the ministry. Nobody, of course, directly asked my views, but so much of my own thinking and so many of my own recommendations over the years are reflected. One senses a gelling of determination for change outside the JTA.

So there will be more resources directed to early childhood education, the foundation of the system, but also its Cinderella. Engaging parents, community and church more strongly. Emphasis on social/civic education. Devoting early primary to literacy and numeracy. "First teach them to read," I wrote years ago. Upper primary emphasising higher-order thinking skills to be examined in improved primary exit assessment. Arresting residual illiteracy and innumeracy at grade seven, the entry point into the secondary level.

Introduction of a standard high-school diploma and revamping the adult equivalent high-school diploma. Articulating the HEART Trust/NTA with the mainstream school system and strengthening technical/vocational education. Using labour-market analysis to guide state investment in tertiary education. Training in school leadership. Greater use of media and ICT.

Improving efficiencies

The ministry is seeking to improve its own internal efficiencies and has hired IT expertise to drill down into the copious data it has at its disposal. I have been saying for years that the data from the standardised tests of the National Assessment Programme can be used to not only measure student performance but allow performance assessments and comparisons down to individual schools and teachers, the JTA notwithstanding, information which should be made public, especially as Government seeks to 'rope in' parents more strongly.

But there are some critical educational and peri-educational issues needing closer attention if a stronger ROI is to be achieved: Safe communities and efficient public transport are education issues. Better capitalisation of the SLB for student loans is urgently necessary. There is extraordinary indiscipline, disorderly conduct, sheer violence and general social unreadiness to engage learning in the schools. This is deeply affecting teaching and learning. The minister and ministry have not gone far enough to articulate a plan to return order to the schools, to contain disruptive elements, and give ready students a better chance to get on with learning.

The teaching/learning interface is at the very heart of education. Students must be prepared to learn. And teachers must be prepared to teach as master experts. We are tiptoeing around the very obvious fact that, by and large, Jamaican teachers are drawn from the second eleven (and have been paid as such). They enter training for a low-ranking profession with generally fewer CSEC passes obtained at lower grades than many other professions.

And then they are overdosed with 'education', learning how to teach, rather than loaded up with content, learning what to teach. Good teachers must be deep content experts. Content experts can be very quickly and easily shown how to teach. The revolution should close the teachers' colleges and train teachers in regular tertiary institutions by deep content immersion, with 'education' attached as a professional rider. But then they would have to be paid appropriately to be retained for long.

Since scrapping the teachers' colleges stands as much chance of happening as reducing the education budget, a workable alternative is to require that all teachers, during out-of-class non-leave times, obtain continuing education credits through courses taught by master experts offering deep immersion in known problem areas in the subjects they teach. CXC can easily identify these. Another fight with the JTA?

And this is not just secondary level. Who will the Government be relying on to teach higher-order thinking skills at the upper primary level? My own considerable experience teaching critical thinking, research and communication skills at the tertiary undergraduate and graduate levels is that higher-order thinking skills are poorly developed all the way up.

Everybody, including the teachers and their union, wants improved education performance. Let's get on with it!

Martin Henry is a communication specialist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.