Editorial | Go all out on education

GIVEN THE long hiatus in classes and the abandonment of the final segment of this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examinations for grade-six students, the method to be used by the education ministry to place children in high schools in September is as good as any, and probably better than most. The students will be assessed on the basis of their performance in literacy and numeracy tests at grade four; how they did last year, at grade five, in the critical subjects in the syllabus for PEP; and on their achievements in the element of the PEP exam taken in February, before COVID-19 threw the school system into disarray.

Hopefully, by the time the new school year begins, the novel coronavirus that’s responsible for COVID-19 will be either under control or we are better adapted to living with it, so that schooling can return to a semblance of normality, with teachers and students together in classrooms. For, as this newspaper predicted, the Government’s wholly appropriate attempt to get on with teaching and learning online has highlighted the digital divide between schools, communities and families, to an extent which we believe has been severely underestimated by the education minister, Karl Samuda.

In the circumstances, the Government has no choice but to massively scale-up the project to deliver tablet computers to students and teachers, and make Internet access far easier. At the same time, it has to devise a mechanism to provide economic support to those distressed private schools that are important to the system, but likely to face collapse.

The disparities between Jamaican schools – largely reflected in the communities in which they are located and the socio-economic background of their students, which often impacts the preparation they receive – is well known and often commented on. It is against that background that it was easy for us to determine, with good accuracy, the schools where large proportions of their students would, at best, take only very limited advantage of the delivery of classes by digital means.

Mr Samuda claimed this week that despite the Government’s negotiating subsidies on data/Internet rates with the main telecoms providers for teachers and students, “approximately 30 per cent of the cohort lives in areas where they have no Internet facility”. He estimated that 31,000 students weren’t part of the ‘virtual learning’ process.

The cohort to which Mr Samuda referred isn’t clear. It is obviously not grade-six students, around 45,000 of whom usually enter high school each year. Thirty-one thousand of this group would be closer to 69 per cent.

BETTER PARTICULARS

Moreover, given Mr Samuda’s declaration that 31,000 students represent 30 per cent of those without access to digital classes, the math suggests a cohort of more than 103,000.

That could probably be the case if the analysis takes in grades four, five and six, and a sprinkling from other grades. Further, there are close to 230,000 students in all grades of the Government’s primary-school system, plus another 212,000 or so in its secondary schools. Large chunks of these populations, more than 31,000, we expect, would, if Mr Samuda counted closely, have had only patchy access to their digital schooling.

The minister’s report needs further, and better, particulars.

In any event, we applaud the administration’s agreement with one company to deliver wireless Internet service to 100 communities with 238 schools. We are also happy at the rejuvenation of the Tablet in Schools Programme – for which a pilot was done six years ago, when 24,000 computers were delivered to students. But even with the 18 per cent increase in the number of tablets, the provision of 47,000 of these computers to students isn’t ambitious enough. Each child at primary school, and certainly between grades four and six, should be supplied with a computer. If necessary, the central government should cover any shortfall in financing the project by the Universal Service Fund, which makes its money from access on telephone calls landed in Jamaica.

Like other businesses whose consumers are without jobs and can’t afford to pay for services, private schools, too, are stressed by the pandemic. These schools, at the preparatory level, cater for around 25,000 students. Another 5,000 students attend private high schools. If they go under, it will be difficult for the government institutions to readily absorb their students. The problem this would cause to the education system is one Jamaica can’t afford.

That is why, notwithstanding Minister Samuda’s admonition against bailing out private businesses, the Government should review its position and deal with troubled schools on a case-by-case basis. In any event, the Government has agreed to shore up other sectors of the economy.