COVID-19, education and the digital divide
AFTER MORE than a month’s break, Jamaica’s schools are to formally reopen tomorrow in what the education authorities characterise as a “distance teaching/homeschooling” mode. Unfortunately, for most parents and many teachers, there is an absence of clarity about what this means, although it sounds as if it includes using online and digital technology.
This newspaper supports any initiative to safely deliver instruction and learning to the hundreds of thousands of children, without bundling students into overcrowded classrooms, running the risk of spreading the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). All parents should, as far as possible, ensure that their children access all that is offered to compensate for the instruction time already lost, and lack of faceto-face contact with teachers.
That notwithstanding, the situation will further highlight, and potentially exacerbate, the divide between Jamaican schools and their educational outcomes. But it’s also an opportunity for renewed, solution-oriented discussion of the crisis of Jamaica’s two-tier education system.
With regard to the use of technology in schools to enhance educational outcomes, and now for remote learning, Jamaica has an embryo solution, which is in need of aggressive implementation and massive scaling up. In the meantime, the education authorities’ glib declarations about their preparation for students’ involvement in digital learning is, with respect to most schools and households, a placebo.
ACCEPTED BASE STANDARD
Each year, only a fifth of Jamaican students who sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams pass five subjects, including mathematics and English, at a single sitting. This is the accepted base standard for matriculation to higher education. The students in this category attend the top 50 or so high/secondary schools, most of which not only consistently produce excellent results, but have long traditions of high performance.
The other 120 secondary schools muddle along with mostly indifferent performances. They account for the bulk of the nearly 40 per cent of students who don’t pass English, and the nearly 60 per cent who fail at math. They are largely the schools, too, into which are fed the students who struggle at primary school, including the approximately one-third, who, at grade six, are ill-equipped for secondary education.
Put another way, the struggling high schools get their students mostly from the 585 government primary schools, where, but for small pockets of excellence, the quality of output is wanting. On the other hand, the elite high schools have the best performers from the primary level, and those students whose parents paid for them to attend private preparatory schools or could afford to invest in additional tuition.
These parents are the ones who can more than likely afford computers, Internet connections, and live in domestic circumstances that are nurturing to education. The high schools their children attend are also the ones where parents and alumni can subsidise inadequate government subventions.
To put it bluntly, there is an economic/class/ social divide in Jamaica’s education system that will be increasingly apparent as it seeks to adapt to the strictures imposed by COVID-19. Large numbers of schools are not equipped to seriously deliver online/digital teaching, and even when they can, large swathes of children will struggle to be part of the process. Many homes lack computers and Internet service. While smartphones are seemingly ubiquitous, Internet connectivity using these devices is sporadic for poorer Jamaicans. They can’t afford continuous service.
JAMAICA A WI-FI HOTSPOT
Part of the answer to this conundrum may rest with the Tablets In School project that has limped along since its pilot six years ago, when 24,000 tablet computers were distributed to students and teachers in 30 schools. The project was financed by the Universal Service Fund (USF), which supports digital connectivity in Jamaica from a tax on foreign telephone calls landed on domestic telephone networks.
The programme has since lagged because of attempts to reinvent the wheel, and disputes between the USF and its supplier. They got on with it, but slightly rejigged and massively expanded. Rather than providing 40,000 returnable tablets to students, each child in a primary school, from grade four to grade six, should be provided with the tablet, which would be written off over three years. So, the child who receives one at grade four would have the same machine until she/he enters high school.
At high school, children on PATH would be eligible for tablets. Eligibility by others would be on the basis of other forms of means testing.
Further, via the USF and/or other sources, the telecoms service providers should be paid on a contractual basis to deliver Internet connections to prescribed machines, and possibly making the entire Jamaica a Wi-Fi hotspot during periods of emergency.