Editorial | Put education EPOC in place before April

NOTWITHSTANDING THE recency of the publication of the Patterson Commission report on reforming Jamaica’s education system, it is surprising that the Government is not yet robustly drumming up public discussion on its findings.

It is not that the commission discovered anything really new. We have long known that the island’s education is in deep crisis, delivering suboptimal outcomes. Taxpayers already do not get value for the money ($114 billion this fiscal year) they spend on the sector. Yet, in the coming fiscal year, starting in April, they are likely to be asked to find an additional $5 billion or so to fund the public education sector.

There is little choice but to do it. Given the depth of the crisis, and its worsening caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the country cannot await a full debate of the commission’s report before launching an assault on the failures to which it refocuses attention. That is why this newspaper not only endorses its findings, but insists on the urgent implementation of one of its key recommendations, covering two critical undertakings:

• That the transformation to which the Government commits itself are independently, robustly and transparently monitored and measured; and

• That, as a corollary to the first point, ensures that the education budget is efficiently spent.

That is the context in which the commission called for a group, akin to the Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC), when that body was at its most effective – at the time, Jamaica was in a borrowing agreement with the International Monetary Fund – to monitor and report on the implementation of the education project.

As was noted by Professor Orlando Patterson’s group, Jamaica’s education spend, at over five per cent of gross domestic product, places it in good standing with its regional peers, who achieve far better returns on their investments. The commission, for instance, noted that in the 2019 Primary Exit Profile tests for grade-six students (which emphasises analytic thinking over memorised learning), a third of students could not read, 56 per cent could not write, and 57 per cent could not deduce information from simple sentences. “[At] the end of primary school, the majority of students remain illiterate and innumerate, and most leave secondary school with no marketable skill,” the report noted.

Worsened during pandemic

This learning crisis has been exacerbated by a coronavirus pandemic. Jamaica’s schools, like many around the world, were shuttered to prevent the spread of the disease. There was an attempt to deliver education online. However, the education authorities reported that they could not account for 120,000 students (27 per cent of the combined primary and secondary enrolment) who just dropped out of the system. Some are now only trickling back. Of those who logged into their digital classrooms, the attendance of up to a third, or more, was sporadic.

Students, in other words, have suffered massive learning loss. They have much catching up to do. World Bank analyses say it will require an additional investment of between $2.4 billion and $3.9 billion in each of at least two years to pay for the remedial efforts.

Even before this call for the additional investment, the Government’s project was for a $2-billion addition to the education budget in the 2022-23 fiscal year, which begins in April. This increase in the budget, though, would have represented a rise of only two per cent, significantly below the rate of inflation. These demands are against the backdrop of an economy still not fully emerged from its COVID-19-induced recession and the Government, in tight fiscal circumstances, faced with many competing demands on limited resources.

Budget must be spent

In the circumstances, we want to ensure that not only that there is new spending, but that the entire education budget is better spent than in the past, and that it achieves greater returns than hitherto. In that regard, we fully back the commission’s proposal that “the education sector should be designated an area of national priority”. Hence, its call for the EPOC-like transformation and monitoring arrangements.

Said the commission: “The Education Progress Committee (a working name) should be responsible for the implementation of Jamaica’s education reform measures. This body should develop annual work plans with targets, and should prepare quarterly and annual reports that outline achievements against targets. This committee should have dedicated resources and institutional support, and performance should be publicly available.”

This makes sense. The absence of oversight in the past, we believe, greatly contributed to other reform initiatives, despite their receipt of policy commitments and fiscal support. Bureaucrats remained ascendant.

With respect to the suggested oversight committee, it must be in place, and at work, before the start of the new financial year on April 1. And we propose that rather than being an ad hoc committee, it should be made a formal commission of Parliament, with powers similar to other commissions. It might be subject to a sunset clause of eight years.

Members of the commission might be appointed by the governor general, using a model resembling that of the Electoral Commission, except that some of the seats would be filled on the recommendations of key stakeholder institutions, representing several broad facets of the society.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness must begin the consultations now to have the committee established within the time frame we suggest.