Once we take care of teacher interests, we must also focus on student needs and student performance

The President’s announcement of big increases for teachers and public workers is a step in the right direction. It’s not the end of the journey of ongoing increases and better conditions of work necessary for teacher recruitment and teacher retention. The announced increases are just a start. The President may have exceeded some of the provisions of the current Collective Bargaining agreement with the Guyana Teachers’ Union, but must eventually honour all obligations under the agreement, in a quest for harmonious relationships and respect for our workers in education.

Education is a pivotal, foundational institution in any society. It drives everything. Without teachers, where will doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, policemen, crooked politicians, farmers come from? Since the emerging oil and related industries will pull labour from the current labour pool, we must enact comprehensive, planned strategies to recruit and retain teachers. Education must be embedded with “pull” factors not “push” factors that drive people out of education. In Singapore, for instance, to get into teacher education programmes at universities, you have to be among the higher grade point averages, and teachers command much respect there. Even though we are deemed the fastest growing economy on earth, while others come into Guyana and make big money based on American and European pay scales, our own people will bail out at the drop of a hat, if they get an opportunity to work abroad. Why? Why, for instance, would our own people go abroad and do menial work that they don’t want to do in Guyana? The currency exchange rate is one reason. Tiny islands such as those in the Eastern Caribbean with little to no natural resources have a higher currency than that of the fastest growing economy in the world. Why and what are we doing about it? The President’s announcement of more pay, bonuses, and duty-free concessions is commendable, as the Government focuses on the teacher factors that affect our education system. But we must also think about the student factors. Most of our students are failing at the NGSA level, and there are large failures at the CSEC level. Our education system is still founded on an outdated, outmoded, malpractice called the NGSA. That needs reform. Once we take care of the teacher interests, we must also focus on the student needs and student performance. We must confront the brutal facts of our collective failures in education and ask what is to be done in a “no-fault,” consensus approach, as the “Comer Model” suggests. This is where we need the Ministry, the Teachers Union, Tertiary and Higher Education, Private/ Independent Schools and Institutions, Business and Industry, and Parents to come together in a broad coalition to revamp our education system. We must use data-driven interventions to fix all low performing schools, and increase innovation and excellence in the high performing schools. We need to take the data school by school and ask, why are we getting that level of performance, and what else needs to be done to get better results. After all, while vital inputs are necessary and we measure those, we also need to measure our educational outcomes and student performance at each school. Accountability must be high, expectations must be high that “All Children Can Learn,” and it cannot be business as usual. To use a slogan from a bygone era, “We Can, We Must, We Will.”