There is no evidentiary basis for the value of the ‘brain cap’
Dear Editor, This year has not been good for the education sector in Guyana. Whether it is the brain tax, the appointment of Ms Nicolette Henry as the acting Minister of Education, and, now, a proposal to cap the number of Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) subjects taken by students in public high schools, the effluence of bad ideas coming out of the policy pipeline is unceasing. The brain cap proposal, first reported on last week, to limit senior and junior secondary school students to writing ten and six subjects respectively, constitutes an arbitrary ceiling on student achievement with no evidentiary basis.
Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, the recently ‘reassigned’ head of the Ministry of Education under whose tenure the brain cap has its genesis, defended it as necessary to ensure students have a “wider cultural” experience, whereby they spend less time taking notes and studying and more time engaging in extra-curricular pursuits. Taken at face value, Dr Roopnaraine’s reasoning falls apart pretty quickly when considered in the face of reality.
At the CSEC level, the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), has on offer subjects like Music, Visual Arts, Theatre Arts, Physical Education and Sport, Home Economics, Information Technology, and Industrial Technology for students interested in the arts, sports, cooking, and working with their hands. The notion that academic endeavours conflict with out-of-classroom pursuits is hard to swallow when one considers that many of these prolific students, including your correspondent, who has fifteen grade one and one grade two passes to his name, are either avid debaters, athletes, musicians, artists or poets.
Endorsing the Ministry’s brain cap, the President of the Guyana Teachers’ Union, Mr Mark Lyte, in remarks to the press, posited another reason, saying, “Our students are being pressured to take too many subjects all for bragging rights. All someone needs for employment or to further their studies is five subjects inclusive of Mathematics and English. So the union supports this move by the ministry.” While it is not clear whether Mr Lyte consulted broadly with public secondary school teachers before purporting to speak on their behalf, he does reflect a sentiment felt by many. That Guyanese can set aside their partisanship to fete the country’s star students more rapturously than they do the Guyana Amazon Warriors should be celebrated.
However, to prevent this cultural fervour from manifesting itself in the form of undue parental and teacher pressure on students to write many subjects, the Ministry of Education should train school instructors and administrators in academic counselling, and focus the agency’s efforts on appropriate guidance for students who can’t, and not on taking away the choice from all students, including those who can. Moreover, Mr Lyte seems to not have a clear understanding of the other, more tangible incentives that fuel this long-running trend of prolificness at the CSEC level. Many of these students are not just aiming to matriculate at the University of Guyana ‒ where your correspondent studied ‒ or land any old job. These candidates are actively competing for the CXC-provided scholarships to study at the University of the West Indies (UWI); for places at universities in the United States, the UK and elsewhere; and, in an ever more competitive labour market, for a limited number of well-paying, meaningful jobs.
There is also the matter of why and how the government gets to make as consequential a decision as how much a student is allowed to study. Writing from experience, what a student opts to study is decided after intense deliberations among the student, her instructors, parents, peers, as well as other family members and wellwishers. It is a highly individualized and personal process that considers the student’s interests, aptitude, as well as the costs of and rewards from pursuing any given academic pathway. It is presumptuous for any bureaucrat at Brickdam, at more than an arm’s length, to usurp the agency of those who best know the student, including the student herself, to shape that student’s future.
However, there are instances when government does have a good basis for trying to shape the patterns of citizens’ behaviour. However, these rules, such as they are, are based on verifiable hypotheses of what they are intended to accomplish. For example, mandatory immunization requirements for public school students are vigorously defended because unvaccinated students are a demonstrable public health hazard, as the recent measles outbreak among an unvaccinated segment of the Somali-American population in Minnesota demonstrates. Besides the very sketchy idea that the brain cap would encourage participation in co-curricular activities, what measure of optimality revealed that ten and six subjects were ideal for senior and junior secondary schools respectively? Why not nine and five, or eleven and seven, respectively?
One criterion for measuring the utility of any innovation in education policy, whether it is after-school programmes, free meals for students or higher salaries for teachers, is its impact on the maths and reading skills of students. In this vein, there is a very real and not easily dismissible concern that students who do too many subjects spread themselves too thinly and do not do as well as they would have in maths and reading and writing had they focused their time, energies and resources on a more narrow range of subjects. Mr Gordon Moseley, the journalist who owns the online media outlet News Source, echoed a sentiment shared by many when he remarked on a lively Facebook thread, “Barbados allows only 8 subjects at [CSEC] level. Guess which country leads Guyana in overall passes in all subject areas and overall.”
Comparing public school students in Guyana to public school students in Barbados in such simplistic terms is tantamount to statistical heresy, as Barbados is, far and away, richer and better governed than Guyana is. Its schools are better funded and better run, and its teachers better paid and better trained. To throw these other factors out the window and seemingly conclude that the better performance of Bajan students is solely as a result of a brain cap, is misleading.
To properly test whether writing more than ten or six subjects leads to a lower pass rate in Mathematics and English, the policy makers need to look homeward. Using the results of the CSEC candidates from senior secondary schools, over the period 2011-16, as a sample, an odds ratio should be computed to reveal what is the probability that a senior secondary school student who writes more than ten subjects gets less than, say, a Grade Two in Mathematics and English Language. The same measure should be computed for those junior secondary school students who write more than six subjects.
However, because correlation is not causation, a more comprehensive method is needed to further test the hypothesis that a brain cap could lift overall performance. This method would entail an analysis to determine what factors, such as the students’ economic and social backgrounds, the quality and effectiveness of their instructors, as well as the number of subjects written, really, at the CSEC level, drive overall student performance, as measured by the number of passes attained as a percentage of the total number of subjects taken in a sitting. Considering that this brain cap only impacts public school students after they’d have already completed 12 years of schooling, it is doubtful that this measure would transform the students’ literacy and numeracy skills in any meaningful way. As the old Guyanese saying goes, ‘What the rain couldn’t fill, dew drops won’t either.’
If the government is hoping for a quick fix to the education sector by instituting a brain cap, it won’t happen, because there are no quick fixes. As Stanford University economist, Dr Eric Hanushek writes, “The educational process is simply much too complicated for researchers to uncover a small set of things that are amenable to central legislation and control that can make a decisive difference in the quality of educational achievement.” Yours faithfully, Saieed I Khalil