Saving Fayval Williams and the Jamaican education system

Fayval Williams, the education minister, faces the difficult task of addressing the country's poor education system. Williams must reorient the primary school mission towards ensuring every student leaves with adequate reading, writing, and math skills. Currently, a significant number of grade-seven students struggle with literacy and numeracy, impacting their performance in secondary education. Williams must take decisive actions, including stopping automatic promotions for unprepared students and focusing on the basics of primary education. The implementation of policies similar to those in southern US states, like Mississippi, is recommended to tackle the crisis.

Fayval’s path to greatness

Jamaica Gleaner

7 Aug 2023

FAYVAL WILLIAMS has perhaps the most unenviable job in Jamaica’s Government. She is the island’s education minister, overseeing a system that delivers poor outcomes.

Yet, Ms Williams has an opportunity to turn things around and be an outstanding minister – and, in time, revered by Jamaicans. For this to happen, though, Ms Williams, apart from anything else she may do with the portfolio, must urgently re-orient the mission of the island’s primary schools. Their fundamental obligation must be to ensure that no child leaves without being able to read or write or do sums at their grade level. Their critical mandate, in other words, must be for every student to enter high school fully literate and numerate.

That will require rigorous ministerial interventions, including unplugging the escalator that annually automatically lifts primary-school students from one class to the next, no matter how ill-prepared they are for promotion.

Generally, up to a third of the island’s grade-seven students, children between 11 and 12, ‘graduate’ from primary school somewhere between being illiterate or being barely able to read or write. A few years ago, nearly six in 10 (57 per cent) of them, a commission that reviewed the sector noted, could not “identify information in a simple sentence”. A similar number could not write properly.

Despite an improvement in test scores this year, of over 36,000 children who were subjected to the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams to test their readiness for secondary education, 40 per cent fell below the grade for proficiency in language arts. Over 2,500 of these students (seven per cent) were off the charts, deemed to be in need of “intensive” interventions to bring them to what is expected at grade seven, which is their first class in high school. Another 12,000 were in need of what the education ministry identifies in its PEP explanation kit as “targeted academic support”.

WORSE IN MATHEMATICS

The situation was even worse in mathematics. More than half the students (53 per cent) did not meet the standard for proficiency. That is, over 19,000 students were in need of support to bring them to the grade-seven level.

This weak performance in English and maths, the foundation upon which the teaching and learning experience is built, has a cascading effect on other subjects on which students are tested in PEP, such as science and social studies.

So, each year, the education ministry attempts to play catch-up, hoping to bring students up to speed on knowledge and concepts that they should have learned in earlier grades. The remediation usually starts with special classes for the lagging students early during the summer recess. This year, 28,000 students who are either to enter grade five or transition to high school in September were part of this project – fewer than 3,000 in live classes and the remainder online.

But these interventions are hardly ever sufficient. So the poor outcomes of primary school spill over into the secondary system, often setting the trajectory for students’ performance at that level.

NOT SURPRISING

It not surprising, therefore, that despite large swathes of the cohort being screened out the exams – in addition to the students who drop before grade 11 (the fifth year of secondary education) – that fewer than three in 10 (28 per cent) of Jamaican students pass five subjects, inclusive of English and maths, in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams. Indeed, as the Patterson Commission on the transformation of the education system observed in its 2021 report: “Most students leave secondary school without a certificate – 70 per cent of the 18-year-old cohort in 2018.”

The Patterson Commission offered many good, technically sound recommendations for fixing Jamaica’s education crisis, which the Government says it has set about implementing – unfortunately, without engaging in a significant public discourse on the report. The commission’s insistence on dealing with the many, and glaring, problems in the earlychildhood and pre-primary sectors, for instance, is important.

In the meantime, however, even as it emphasises the critical thinking that underpins PEP, Ms Williams must command a return to, or focus on, the basics in primary school. No child must leave the system incapable of reading, writing, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. If a child cannot do these things satisfactorily for his or her age or grade level, then that child must not be automatically promoted to a higher class.

In this regard, Ms Williams, should, as this newspaper proposed previously, borrow from the several states in the southern United States, especially Mississippi, and convince the Holness administration to legislate the policy. The law forbidding automatic promotions must be buttressed by appropriate teaching strategies to improve reading. Additionally, interventions must be launched to identify, and sensitively help, those reading-deficient high-school students who were carried along by the conveyor system, notwithstanding their unreadiness for secondary education.

There will be the arguments of the difficulties and impracticability of doing these things. Those arguments are wrong. Any obstacle is the absence of will. Which is what we hope Minister Williams can muster to defeat the crisis.

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