EDITORIAL - How Mr Van Roekel can help the JTA

It is bad enough when private individuals ignore the sanctity of contracts and attempt, arbitrarily, to abrogate their responsibilities under binding agreements.

It is worse, we believe, when states engage in such behaviour. It not only undermines a critical expression of the right to property, but also weakens an important segment of the foundation upon which modern societies are built.

Which is why this newspaper, in these columns, more than once, endorsed the recent ruling of the Jamaican courts on the inescapable obligation of the Jamaican Government to police officers for salary hikes that were unilaterally frozen and the judge's chiding of the state for the arbitrariness of its action.

It is not enough for the Government, however truthful or sincere its claim, to make a broad declaration of inability to pay.

'It's plain wrong'

It is for the same reason that we also support the declaration of Mr Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association (NEA) in the United States (US), that "it's plain wrong" that the Jamaican Government unilaterally sideline a negotiated schedule for paying outstanding salaries to teachers.

"It's incumbent on both parties to honour that agreement," Mr Van Roekel said in a speech to the annual conference of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) on Monday. Or, they had a responsibility to, collectively, negotiate new terms.

But as much as we agree with Mr Van Roekel, we wish that there were something more in his public measure to Jamaican teachers - that they should expect to perform for their pay.

The back pay that is now in dispute between the JTA and the administration has to do with Finance Minister Audley Shaw's decision in 2008 to implement the finding of a report, commissioned by his predecessor, to lift the salaries of teachers to within 80 per cent of those comparable professionals in the private sector. The cost was J$15 billion, of which the Government had already paid J$7 billion, when it was confronted with a fiscal crisis.

What neither Mr Shaw nor Education Minister Andrew Holness did was to link that major hike in salaries to performance by teachers. Like the economy, Jamaica's education system is in crisis.

Poor classroom effort

Up to a quarter of students complete primary school without being fully literate, and each year only about a fifth of the students graduate from high schools with sufficient passes in CXC exams to matriculate to tertiary education. At grade four, more than 40 per cent of the students have not mastered all the competencies for literacy and numeracy.

The JTA has been quite adept at making all the arguments for these failures, except the ones that have to do with poor classroom effort and incompetence on the part of its members. It is not in the business of holding its members in any way accountable for educational outcomes and linking their salaries to this.

We do not know what is the NEA's position on increasing effort in the US to hold teachers accountable for performance, such as is the recent case in Washington DC, as noted in this column, when more than 170 teachers were earmarked for firing and more than 200 others put on notice.

It is the kind of approach that ought to be embraced by incoming JTA president Nadine Molloy, and which Mr Van Roekel should encourage her to do.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.