Obduracy a danger to PEP
THERE IS consensus among Jamaica’s parents, educators and the political Establishment for a primary curriculum that encourages critical thinking by, and the continuous testing of, the island’s primary students. No one wants to have them cramming for a final exam to determine their readiness for secondary education.
In that sense, people back the idea of the national standard curriculum that is still into a mawkish, klutzy entry into the school system, upon which rests the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) for grade six students, the first cohort of which will be tested next May. What there is disagreement on is whether the bulk of the 800 primary schools that will be subject to PEP are prepared to deliver its curriculum, and the first consequential review of students, based on the new system, should take place in a mere six months.
That the first performance task testing of grade six students will now take place in March 2019, rather than this December, represents a three-month delay of the examination by the education minister, Ruel Reid, in the face of pressure from various quarters. The teachers’ union, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), has grudgingly agreed.
What Mr Reid believes he has in his favour, we assume, is that PEP was in gestation for several years, and that teachers have been engaged on the final product since 2016. He will recount the 18 sensitisation sessions his officials held with parents and the more than 100 seminars conducted by subject specialists and education officers, at which between 40 and 400 teachers were present.
That, on the face of it, is a lot. Such information, in the absence of a larger context, might have been unassailably compelling. But while it is our position that the JTA often falters against big ideas and usually fails to offer its members transformational leadership, we are, on this matter, bound to pay attention to their concerns and warnings.
“PEP remains a mystery, and teachers, students and parents are still anxious, even after several workshops have been held and the publication of newspaper articles, which have attempted to allay our fears,” its president, Garth Anderson, warned at the JTA’s annual conference a month ago. Failure, in that circumstance, is probable. Dr Anderson may have been hyperbolic. His fears, however, are not entirely baseless.
NOT LIKE MULTIPLE-CHOICE EXAMS
Indeed, it is the education ministry’s contention that attendance/participation at those workshops was “initially tepid”. It was not only after the presentation of the “PEP performance tasks pilots”, which we assume were mock exams, that teachers began to appreciate that PEP “was not going to be the usual multiplechoice-type exams”. Students will have to show more than a capacity to recite facts. They will have to display a capacity to manipulate information.
Notably, too, the data from those pilots, only latterly revealed, despite the spin, aren’t encouraging. We are not sanguine that a three-month delay in the first PEP exam will change much.
Indeed, the concerns harboured by parents are exacerbated by maladroit management of the distribution of the curriculum, which was still taking place at the start of the school year, as well as the bungling over the applicability of study texts, including whether books from the old curriculum will cross over.
Even if we concede unprofessionalism, laziness and self-interest of teachers, who may fear that PEP will destroy their cottage industry of extra lessons, there remain reasons for pause and reflection, rather than a helter-skelter implementation of PEP.
Introducing the system, and having the first profiles of grade six students during Minister Reid’s watch, may be good for his résumé. However, the minister’s, the Government’s and the society’s real obligation is to the thousands of children whose lives and future depend on the quality of education they receive and our ability to assess the value of those outcomes.
In England, when they introduced a new primary curriculum in 2014, it was two years, in 2016, before the first cohorts, six- and seven-year-olds and 10- and 11-year-olds, were tested on it. A similar phased approach wouldn’t do violence to PEP. Indeed, while the curriculum is in place, it would provide an opportunity for us to work out its kinks and upgrade resources, including orienting teachers’ colleges to the pedagogy demanded of this approach to education.