EDITORIAL - Hold recalcitrant heads to account

It is our wont in Jamaica to sugar-coat and tiptoe around problems, rather than attacking them frontally. Then, mostly, they remain unsolved and fester.

That appears to be the preferred option of Stanford Davis, the president of the Association of Principals and Vice-Principals, a subgroup of the Jamaica Teachers' Association, to the latest identified leadership failing in education.

The education ministry must have none of it.

Indeed, we endorse the ministry's insistence on leadership/management training for weak, poor-performing head teachers and its threat to sanction those who resist the courses. We also support its move to hold accountable school-board chairmen whose principals snub the training.

The dismal out-turn of the Jamaican education system is widely known.

Still struggling with literacy

At grade four, more than 40 per cent of students do not have basic mastery of literacy and numeracy, and a similar proportion enter high school at grade seven still struggling with literacy.

By grade 11, when students sit the regional Caribbean Examinations Council's (CXC) secondary education competency tests, a third of the cohort that started at grade 11 has already either dropped out of the system or is screened from the exams - the latter group on the assumption that they are not good enough to do the CXC tests.

Indeed, at CXC, less than 20 per cent of Jamaican students pass five subjects, including English and maths, at a single sitting. Of the more than 260,000 papers written by Jamaicans in the CXC exams, our students fail in about a third of them.

There are myriad causes for these outcomes. But a recent review of approximately 300 schools by the education ministry is worth noting. About 79 per cent of the students performed below benchmark standards. Leader/management performance was considered to be merely satisfactory at 46 per cent. It was good to excellent in nine per cent.

Leadership/management poor

Expressed differently, leadership/management was poor in 45 per cent of these schools, and 91 per cent of them didn't meet the benchmark to be categorised as 'good' or 'excellent'. The bottom line: leadership/management skills in our schools are overwhelmingly mediocre to poor.

This provides some of the context for the education ministry's establishment of a National College for Educational Leadership, in which 196 principals were enrolled in November 2012. One quarter of these principals failed to turn up for training.

The education minister, Ronald Thwaites, is rightfully disappointed. He has told school boards to take action against the delinquents. Last week, the ministry mustered chairmen of the schools with the dodgers to reinforce its position.

But Mr Davis, whose association represents head teachers of so-called non-traditional high schools, wants "dialogue and consensus" before any action is taken against the recalcitrants. Worse, he calls for this matter, in which taxpayers' money and the future of Jamaica's children are at risk, not to be made "a public issue". At least, not at this time.

So, talk about it in private. Mr Davis sees in "public dialogue" and the proposed sanctions a behaviour that is "threatening and intimidating".

In other words, the ministry should tiptoe, sugar-coat and, perhaps, hug, cry, and commiserate. In the meantime, the schools continue to fail and our students underperform.

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