Excellence in name only?

In the 1990s, the Patterson administration had a big idea for the transformation of Jamaican schools, affording secondary students equality in the education they received. It went about rebranding all-age and junior high schools as high schools, giving practical effect to this by hanging new shingles outside the plants.

The result is today's upgraded high schools that are little changed from what they were two decades ago, with bad management, poor teachers and underachievement by students. Hopewell High, in Jamaica's western parish of Hanover, is not one of the upgraded high schools. It was opened in 2006, which, in some respects, makes the situation worse. There was an opportunity to get things right from the start.

But Hopewell displays many of the characteristics of most of the schools from the 1990s fix - poor educational outcomes. We are concerned that the current education minister, Ronald Thwaites, might, in seeking a solution, make the mistake of the past. The school is to be renamed The Hopewell Centre of Excellence for Vocational and Technical Studies, but without, in so far as we are aware, a robust transformational programme to achieve the wished-for excellence. There are announced plans for a bit of tinkering.

Hopefully, we are wrong.

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