More crooked thinking ...
I JUST wish Edwin Leopold Allen could be reincarnated right now. His straight-thinking, rasping spirit would see through the folly of the unenforceable and unaffordable sixth-form mandate which is being forced on us. ‘Teacher’s’ own life and precept gave witness to strong support for habit-forming and social learning at home and church – even if Mama could not herself read – followed by a rocksolid primary-school experience which, with little or no secondary exposure, could make Allen ready for tertiary matriculation.
Hey! Do you think Edwin Allen would have allowed almost a half of the students at Leicesterfield Primary to ‘ graduate’ without adequate literacy and numeracy skills? We, his successors, are doing just that right now.
Crooked and expedient thinking, a disregard for both history and data, are leading us astray. I appeal to Nigel Clarke, clearly one who is capable of the most straight thinking in the Cabinet. Could he be the public servant he is now without that home, church and primary-school foundation which made Garvey, Allen, Glasspole, Cooke, Wesley Powell, Gladstone Wilson, Gibson, Edith DaltonJames and countless others the cornerstones of our nation?
Look here, what is proposed is a serious denial of reality by those of us who have responsibility for spending over $100 billion of taxpayers’ money each year on education. Check the facts: preCOVID-19 (and it’s going to be worse now), daily absenteeism in our schools, higher among children from poorer households, was in the region of 20 per cent. That means that on average, schoolers miss one-fifth of the already-inadequate 190 days of teaching and learning each year. Why?
SOCIAL SIN
Hello! Isn’t it a social sin that this argument about mandatory sixth form has distracted the public’s attention from the far more serious issues of getting ALL of our children vaccinated and back to school? Why we so love to major in the minors?
Best estimates tell us that at least one-third of our children – easily up to one-half, given spiralling COVID-19 poverty – go to school hungry. Lunch, when available, is too late to stave off early classday, hungry-belly listlessness, restlessness and inattention. Why, again?
Mr Seaga always used to point out that easily 40 per cent of schoolers did no regular homework. He proposed funded after-school programmes. Let’s deal with that too before promoting illiterates to grades 12 and 13.
I remember Audley Shaw’s kind and wholehearted agreement the time in Parliament, long before I served as minister, when I pointed out the danger, waste and sinfulness of social promotion in schools. That’s the practice whereby everyone gets advanced to the next grade each year, regardless of whether you have even attended, let alone attained, the requisite standard of the lower form. The country needs your strong voice now, Audley!
I take responsibility for failing to change public policy and practice about this. Promoting young people to classes where they cannot manage the work because of weak foundations, escalates into worse underperformance and failure at every succeeding grade ending up, at best, in a mass of barely pass grade-three results at CSEC; at worst, twothirds of candidates ending up under-certified. This is what causes the desperate attempt to create ‘Pathways’ to try to recover what should have been done right the first time.
And we haven’t said a word yet about the needs of the starved early-childhood sector, where the problem and any hope of success really lies.
MISPLACED PRIORITY
Sixth forms are good for schools. They add maturity to the whole secondary enterprise. But it is condign folly and recklessly misplaced priority to rush to graft them on high schools where the basic education is not secured.
Better to ensure a place for further education of 11th-grade underachievers in the many underused community colleges, the alternative high-school diploma programme which the Jamaican Foundation for Lifelong Learning was promoting before it was savaged.
Further, HEART, with its over-heavy, hugely expensive bureaucracy, its billions of annual funding; its labour force insufficient Level One and Two preoccupation, begs for reformation to become the real locus for post-grade-11 training.
Give back most of the employers’ contribution to industry and commerce, and enjoin them to offer apprenticeship under the supervision, and to the standards, of the National Service Training Agency.
In short, what we have already invested in must be made to perform better, rather t han to impose some force-ripe addition. In all events, look at the diminishing capital budget projected for education going forward in the big yellow book. So how is the costly investment in infrastructure which the sixthform spree will require, going to be financed? Why big (new?) money for this and not for massive COVID19-caused remediation?
What was really in the mind of the Cabinet? Is this a political gimmick to‘busy dizzy minds’with illusions of progress, camouflaging the deeper systemic problems which we are scared to confront?
So henceforth, the estimated nine to 11 per cent of 11th-graders who migrate soon after CSEC, will go without a high-school graduation certificate. Why? What principle does that heavyhandedness serve?
Then there is the question of cost. The $17,000 per year is not enough to fund quality grade seven to 11 education, let alone sixth form for two years. The ministry acknowledges this by offering much more to the statesponsored tertiary colleges. So, if $80,000 or more per year is needed to offer the same programmes which the high schools are now being mandated to present, how can the money difference be rationalised? Especially when parents, irrespective of means, are not to contribute anything.
Nigel better have a very long pocket! Quality in the existing ‘good-good’sixth forms, which up to now have balanced themselves with parental contributions, is bound to be compromised.
Really, this is embarrassing. Why? What principle does that heavy-handedness serve?
Hon Edwin Leopold Allen, one of the best education ministers Jamaica has had, would never countenance such crooked thinking!