EDITORIAL - Rebalancing classrooms

With several months to go in his tenure as president of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), Mark Nicely still has a chance to make a real difference.

He mustn't waste the opportunity. History wouldn't absolve him. For, not only does he have the job at a time when Jamaicans are sharply focused on the poor state of education and have a seeming will to make it better, but the potential fixes are within relatively easy reach.

Among those, we believe, is the opportunity to better match teachers to the schools where they are needed.

As the education minister, Ronald Thwaites, highlighted last year and his communications director, Byron Buckley, reminded in this newspaper on Monday, there are as many as 1,500 "underemployed" teachers in the state education system. That is about seven per cent of the teachers who receive their salaries from hard-up taxpayers.

The issue is not that these teachers do not turn up to school and attend classes. Rather, changing demographics, population shifts and other factors had made many of them redundant at the schools where they work.

So, by the education ministry's estimates, there are 200 schools, built for much larger populations, that have fewer than 100 students. Mr Buckley says that in many of these, the teacher-to-student ratio is 1:12, or lower. That is about half what the education ministry strives for, but which, across the system, it finds difficult to achieve. Indeed, in some schools, the ration is above 50 students per teacher.

Moving teachers from schools where there are too many, to those where there are too few, is an eminently sensible idea. But it is not only with regard to demographics and ratios that there is a mismatch. Across the system, too, teachers operate outside their areas of competence, while their actual skills are in need at other schools.

But shifting teachers around to achieve the required match/balance is not easy to do.

Negotiate with teachers

First, teachers are not centrally employed. Although paid by the Government, they are hired to specific schools and subject to the direction of the local governors. In other words, they can't just be transferred to an area of need, as might be the case in a private company or even elsewhere in central government.

The education ministry, therefore, has to negotiate with individual teachers. Until recently, the teachers' union has, at least in its public posture, been less than embracing of this idea of transfers based on need.

That it may be softening its position is welcome, especially since its members, in their new positions, would not lose benefits, and the education ministry has pledged to assist, where required, with relocation.

We, however, would welcome from Dr Nicely a more forthright, open endorsement of the process to the value of education.

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