EDITORIAL - Baring the education crisis

Our report last week, aimed at getting a sense of the value added that Jamaica's secondary schools provide their students in the critical subjects of math and English, offers the outlines of a workable formula for a system of performance-based remuneration and incentives for teachers and schools.

But the survey also does something else just as important. It provides more evidence of the crisis facing Jamaica's education system and underlines the urgency with which the country must address the problems, including the use of the tool that it makes more accessible - holding teachers and school principals more accountable for education outcomes.

The Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), the teachers' union, has long resisted any attempt at performance-based pay for its members. It argues that the disparity - in terms of preparedness, available resources, and other socio-economic variables - among 'traditional' high schools is too broad to make any generalised system of pay-based performance useful. We, of course, have never agreed.

But should the JTA be receptive, the analysis we commissioned of pollster Bill Johnson provides a foundation upon which they can build. Mr Johnson looked at the average scores in math and English that children entering each high school received in the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) and used that to rank each of those institutions. The schools whose students had a higher average GSAT score were higher up the league table.

Johnson then looked at how the schools performed five years later in the CSEC exams by weighting the results that the students received based on their grades. Schools could get a maximum CSEC quality score over 4,000, which was used to determine their CSEC ranking. The difference between the ranking when the cohort joined the school and its ranking at CSEC determined that school's comparative value added.

It is on that basis that Waterford High School in Portmore, with a comparative value added of 90, moving from 135th place to 38th, emerged as the best performer in math. But Waterford's CSEC quality score was only 140, or 3.5 per cent of the potential maximum it could have received if all of its students had received grade ones in math at CSEC.

Therein lies the crisis.

Using an arbitrary score of 200, or five per cent of the potential maximum quality score, 59 per cent of the 156 schools fell below that benchmark for math. Indeed, a mere 28 schools, or 18 per cent, managed to attain a CSEC quality score of 800, or 20 per cent of the potential maximum.

Scope of the crisis

While performances are better in English, where Vere Technical moved 60 places, adding most comparative value, the scope of the crisis remains great.

Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of the schools had a quality score of 200 or below; 56 schools, or 36 per cent, did manage a quality score of 800, or 20 per cent the maximum; but a mere 25 of the 156 schools, or 16 per cent, could muster a quality score of 200, or half the maximum.

There can be no more apologies, denials, or whingeing from the JTA. It must acknowledge the crisis, whose fixing cannot await perfection and an abundance of resources. Nor can the education policymakers let up with the effort at reforms. It just has to get on with it, dragging the JTA along, if necessary.

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