Editorial | Funding teachers’ colleges

Having again placed the issue on the agenda, Garth Anderson will hopefully have greater success than the Patterson Commission in igniting substantial public discussion of what is required to entice more students to teachers’ colleges and then into classrooms.

A critical factor, according to Dr Anderson, is for the Government to make it easy for young people to afford teachers’ colleges, and then afterwards pay them decently to stay in classrooms.

“It is my considered view that we have to go back to when teacher training was sponsored by the government where at least 90 per cent of the costs were covered by the state, and students had minimum tuition to pay,” Dr Anderson, the principal of the Anglican-founded Church Teachers’ College, told this newspaper.

It can cost upwards of J$400,000 a year for a four-year training course in some Jamaican teachers’ colleges.

The Patterson Commission – whose report on transforming Jamaica’s education system has, unfortunately, been the subject of too little public debate – didn’t express it in quite those terms. Essentially, though, the commission made the same point.

They called for “a more equitable mechanism for the funding of teachers training institutions, to include quality programme delivery, and investment in human resources”, suggesting that the government should cover 80 per cent of the cost of running teachers’ colleges. The remainder would come from tuition fees.

Further, the commission called for a more rational and consistent mechanism for the allocation of funds to the colleges.

“For example, the Shortwood Teachers’ College received J$462,370 per student in 2019, compared to Sam Sharpe Teachers’ College who received J$1,170,120, and St Joseph’s Teachers’ College, who received J$368,490,” the two-year-old report noted. The GC Foster College for Physical Education and Sports got J$344,280 per student.

Yet, these institutions are part of an eight-member consortium called Teachers’ Colleges of Jamaica (TCJ), of which Dr Anderson is dean.

“There is no defined mechanism for the award of grants for capital works to teachers’ colleges, which presents a challenge for old institutions which need urgent repairs,” said the commission.

Led by the renowned Jamaican sociologist and writer Orlando Patterson, the commission was established by Prime Minister Andrew Holness in 2021, to offer solutions to Jamaica’s education crisis, whose manifestation include the fact that each year more than a third of students, mostly 12-year-olds, complete their primary education either illiterate or reading well below their age and grade levels. Over half of these students can’t extract information from simple English sentences. Further, more than four in 10 students don’t meet the standard for age/grade level competence in mathematics.

WITHOUT CERTIFICATION

Additionally, up to 70 per cent of students leave high school without any form of certification. Of those who do the Caribbean Examination Council’s (CXC) Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) tests, over two-thirds, as was the case this year, fail at maths and over a fifth don’t receive passing grades in English.

These issues form part of the backdrop against which a debate over an exodus from classrooms of many of Jamaica’s best teachers, and the recruitment of foreign teachers to replace some. Last week, for instance, 29 arrived from Cuba to join 75 Cubans who are already in the system, and the government is attempting to recruit from places like India, Ghana and Nigeria.

Among the reasons for their trek from Jamaica, teachers say, is that they enjoy far better salaries and working conditions in Britain, Canada, the United States, and, increasingly, Middle Eastern countries and China. With the recent restructuring of public sector salaries, a high school principal earns up to J$14.3 million and a master teacher, at the highest grade, might make up to J$6.2 million. The pay for a trained graduate teacher is J$3.84 million.

However, critics, including in the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) and the political opposition, have argued that the pay scale, especially for the classroom teachers, remains too low to attract, and retain, the best talent. They say, too, that the recruitment of foreign teachers is, at best, placing band-aids over the problem.

However, the education minister, Fayval Williams, has suggested that many of the criticisms of foreign teachers are unfounded, given the shortages in the classrooms and in recruitment by teachers’ colleges, even in cases, such as for the training of STEM teachers, where scholarships are available.

“It’s not as if we are going to be inundating the sector (with foreign teachers),” she said. Rather, it was “more of a surgical insertion for those gaps that I know we need to fill in our own system”.

HAVE A POINT

Ms Williams may indeed have a point, presuming that she can attract teachers to Jamaica on terms and conditions that won’t lead to greater exodus of Jamaicans from the classrooms.

Unfortunately, the debate on the situation has been insufficiently robust and/or data driven. For instance, it is not known what salaries, or other benefits are being offered to foreign recruits, compared to what is paid to their Jamaican peers.

Neither is it clear how many teachers, and in what subject categories or grades, are being recruited. That can only be known if there has been a full analysis of the shortages in the system, in what subjects and the potential of the cohorts in teachers’ colleges to fill those gaps.

In 2021, the Patterson Commission reported that there 3,600 students enrolled in five teachers’ colleges. But this, apparently, didn’t take into account another 1,800 to 2,000 enrolled in other tertiary-level institutions that offer teacher training.

It isn’t known if, or how, these numbers may have changed, although the crisis in the classrooms seems far more acute.

It is far past time for a full, public engagement of the Patterson report and a deeper dive in the issues affecting education in Jamaica.

That is why an intervention like Dr Anderson shouldn’t be wasted.