Pandemic may help to shatter entrenched educational inequalities here

Dear Editor,

The COVID-19 pandemic may accomplish the unintended consequence of revolutionizing the Guyana education system and shattering decades of entrenched educational inequalities resulting in a persistent poverty of design in our “chalk and talk” education system. In the same way “911” became a historical marker and we speak of “pre-911” and “post-911,” the Coronavirus will also be a historical marker in education. We will be speaking of “pre-COVID” and “post-COVID” educational designs and initiatives.

The Ministry of Education’s decision that students who choose not to take the high school entrance exam - the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) - will be assigned to a high school in their residency area, is actually a first step in the right direction for democratizing the education system. In the USA, for example, students usually go to designated neighbourhood schools in demarcated street addresses and geographical boundaries. There is no high school placement exam. You progress from elementary school, to middle school, to high school in the cluster of schools in your residency area. Schools are invariably equal in quality. You usually are not allowed to attend a school outside of your attendance area boundary, unless it is a special focus “magnet” school or some specialized school for the “academically gifted” or children with disabilities.

In Guyana, historically, the “Common Entrance” or NGSA exam is a sorting and stratification mechanism that ranks students by their scores or marks, and assigns them to a ranked system of high schools of varying quality, ranging from high-scoring students going to schools such as the prestigious President’s College and Queen’s College to the low-scoring students going to the lower-ranked community catchment area high schools. As if that is not enough punishment, many schools with high-scoring students are zealous to publish in the newspapers the students’ pictures, scores and what schools they were awarded. In the USA, such a practice would earn you some jail time for violation of student privacy. I recommend that Guyana abandons this backward system of sorting and the practice of advertising student scores at NGSA and CSEC. This is an iniquitous, inequitable system at best that needs to be dismantled with great haste. NGSA encourages “teaching to the test” and “drill and kill” and authentic learning is lost in the process. Successive governments have failed to acknowledge the NGSA sorting system as a problem and have failed to design a strategic plan to abandon such an outmoded educational relic. It has been a complaint that the Education Ministry officials in Georgetown tend to make sure the Georgetown and Region 4 schools are well taken care of in terms of facilities, technology, staffing and textbooks, while rural and interior schools are not as lucky.

It is educational malpractice to design a system where schools are ranked by quality from excellent to barely OK. And what’s worse, we assign the lower scoring students to the lower ranked schools with fewer resources such as trained teachers, textbooks, curriculum materials, educational technology, laboratories, professional development opportunities, etc. resulting in educational inequities. This goes contrary to the notion that you put the best resources and best teachers to teach the students most in need of help. It would be a great stretch for the Ministry to argue that all the high schools are equal in quality across our 10 Regions. That is currently not so. (Rural lives matter! Hinterland lives matter!). What is needed, is for us to reinvent all high schools so they are all brought up to the same high quality across all 10 regions. Our new education plan should include a “School Equity” component.

With an incoming new government, we have an opportunity for implementing initiatives for education reform. I suggest we establish a taskforce of stakeholders to redesign our education system. The current plan on the Ministry’s website is called “2014-2018 Education Sector Plan (ESP).” Surely, our education system is not what it used to be, but it is not where it needs to be. There have been pockets of excellence and random acts of innovation here and there, but there needs to be a national plan for urgent, rapid reform. Current levels of capacity and technological access are nowhere near to implementing an alternative learning design during the pandemic. TV and radio are passive forms of assistance; we need to develop interactive on-line systems.

Hopefully, the new government will appoint a technocratic person – a professional educator who knows education and can take us to greater heights as we retool our systems to function in a diverse economy with a major oil sector. The new Minister appointed must be capable of helping us accomplish needed and long overdue educational reforms to move us towards a twenty-first century and a new millennium education system.

COVID-19 has revealed all the inadequacies of our current system to provide an alternative education based on digital learning strategies. It has shown up the rural/urban divide and the economic divide where students from more economically advantaged homes have better access to the Internet and students from working class homes have little to no access. Guyana is totally unprepared for a minimal quality of digital learning. Here are some initial suggestions we need to consider:

1. Engage in urgent capacity building strategies to train all teachers and staff in integrating technology in instruction, and train students how to use the digital learning platforms

2. Provide the educational technology to staff members and students either at no cost or at subsidized rates

3. Provide free universal access or subsidized access to Internet services

4. Restart and expand the “One Laptop Per Family” project initiated by the previous PPP government

5. Expand the community Internet hubs/hotspots

6. Create designs for digital teaching and learning appropriate for Guyana and add such relevant coursework to the curriculum at the pre-service and in-service Teachers Training Colleges and University of Guyana education programs

7. Create a strategic “Education Equity” plan for the upgrading of current schools or the construction of new schools to support the model of students attending high quality schools in their catchment areas

8. Use non-profits, churches, and community buildings and organizations with Internet access to support students

9. Revise Guyana education policy documents, incorporating an “Educational Equity” component

10. Engage all stakeholders, especially the parents and unions, in decision making

I welcome any and all suggestions and responses to this article. Please reply to: jjailall@nc.rr.com.

Yours faithfully,

Dr. Jerry Jailall