Funding education
“I HOPE that this year you will treat your courses as more than a sideline” are the reported words of a dean to faculty members at the start of one university’s academic year. At that place, eight (yes, eight) hours of teaching weekly is the requirement. That light commitment presumes time available to prepare (not simply brushing off last year’s notes), mark essays and exam scripts, do lots of original research and, hopefully, depending on your field of expertise, some consultancy.
Do we see commensurate results? Certainly some faculty do prodigious work – exciting lectures, ready availability for tutorials and individual assistance, public service and sharp contributions to issues of national concern and the general advancement of knowledge. That kind deserve the higher pay, the generous leave entitlements and professional advancement. But others?
Faculty in our Jamaican universities are demanding much more money and better working conditions at this time. Hardly surprising given the spiralling cost of living and the vulgar increases which the political class have awarded themselves for what to many, appears to be less valuable work than what they do.
ACCESS NOT QUALITY
Education is a public good so much so that the right to free public schooling to the end of the primary grades is guaranteed. In fact we do better than that. More so than many developed countries, including the US, Jamaica affords a place in school to every child from pre-K to the equivalent to Grade 13. This is a huge achievement which we take for granted. It has been wrought by the sacrificial investment of churches, trusts and private individuals and in later generations, supported by successive governments with taxpayer money. Access is not our problem. Quality is.
RATIONING THE MONEY
Dean Kouwenburg of the Faculty of Humanities and Education is only partly correct that, without more, any reduction of the yearly multi-billion-dollar grant given to the University of the West Indies, could have a negative effect on the supply of teachers in all sectors of education. That faculty should concentrate on graduate students leaving first degrees to the teachers colleges.
Minister Clarke is fully correct in positing that university education provides a high benefit to the individual (usually giving him/her international mobility), as well as to the society whose taxpayers are expected to offer tuition free or at heavy discount. I believe every beneficiary should have some skin in affording their own advancement.
SO WHO SHOULD PAY?
The immediate issue for this and future budgets will be how to balance the available money between the very needy early childhood and primary schools and the block grants to UWI, UTECH (still treated as government’s outside child), the community and teachers colleges. Binary solutions won’t work.
Here are some basic positions which have to be mediated without delay if all our people have a chance to flourish and the economy to stop being stunted. I take full responsibility for not advancing them more forcefully when I bore some responsibility for the sector.
First it is incontrovertible that more money must be invested in education and training. Every dollar allocated must be spent efficiently, which is far from the case now. And the extra resources must come not only from government but proportionately from parents, private enterprise, alumni, church-indeed all lovers of Jamaican people.
I recall interfering in the conversation between two public servant mothers in around 2017 in the parking lot of perhaps the best primary school in the country. With tall- hair styles costing well over $10,000 each (“you expect me to go Dream Weekend looking funky ”?) and sporting concession-entitled“criss as ”, they had come to demand back the auxiliary fee of $7,500 each had paid for their child since “Prime Minister seh ministry give every school enough to run the school good-good. But don’t you did support Michael Manley who said education is free? Well, see how Andrew and Ruel mek it happen. Why you never do it”?
THE PRIORITIES
Literacy in standard English, numeracy, introduction to selective use of information technology and character formation are the remit of the primary schools. The preconditions for success at this level are adequate nutrition, partnerships with parents and churches and accountability of teachers.
ENABLE STUDENTS
UWI and UTECH cater to only some of those who need postsecondary training. With the expansion of university offerings, consideration should be given to a model of tertiary funding whereby scholarships and loan vouchers, with suitable bonding commitments, are awarded students and redeemable within a band of courses offered mainly by local universities and colleges. Then watch those lulled by traditional entitlements step up their game.
All vocational subjects should be paid for out of such balance of the HEART tax which is not devoted to apprenticeship.
Reorganising the spend of the education and training resources would spur the University of the West Indies in particular to conduct a rigorous analysis of its own efficiencies, strengths and shortcomings. I describe that cherished institution as the thinking arm of the Jamaican nation state. They should be the main consulting and policy research source for the nation and be paid accordingly.
UWI faculties have contributed such services in the past which is largely unremembered. A revised agenda of research, policy study and consulting should be the source of sustained future funding along with the tariff from instruction.
RENEWED EFFORT
An ethic of renewed effort has to be the substitute for a sense of victim entitlement. The mistake this government continues to make is to detach wage review from thoroughgoing realignment of role and performance. In an atmosphere of rabid partisanship and special interest, where there is a paranoid reluctance to share power, one administration cannot achieve the required change on their own.
STUNTING OURSELVES
Escalate the matter of funding education to the broader national canvas and you may conclude that a lot of what is going on about local government, as presently structured, is expensive foolishness. If our leaders approached radical reform cooperatively rather than competitively, it could be otherwise.