Teachers alone can stop their abuse

As someone who was trained as an economist, being among the few in Guyana who attended courses sponsored by the IMF’s Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Center (CARTAC), the blame for my extended ten-year stint in the teaching profession is solely mine. This said, with children who are now approaching their CSEC exams, I have had much cause to learn and understand the mechanics of education over the years. My salary aside, I have sought to ensure that all students passing through my hands do their best, this for me being getting Grade Ones not only in the subjects I teach, but in all the subjects they sit. This may sound demanding, but the students I teach happen to be among the most brilliant produced by Guyana, and by extrapolation based on sampling techniques, the world. Indeed, I could say that I have achieved a fair degree of success, with a few being recognized and receiving awards for their performance in the Business Stream over the years, which is the area in which I specialize. This is of course in addition to those who have been achieving a superlative number of Grade Ones at their examinations.

My concern however has always been the general underperformance, in my view, of the national student population. For 2022, given the overall pass rate (Grades 1 to 3) for the general and technical proficiencies was 68.5 percent out of a total of 9,808 students (https://www. stabroeknews.com/2022/09/06/news/guya na/guyana-records-improved-maths-english-performance-at-csec/). This means that around 3,090 students received Grade Four or less. The situation is much worse for Mathematics alone, where only 34.3 percent achieved Grades One to Three. This means that a total of 6,445 students essentially failed mathematics, receiving a Grade IV or less. While it was observed that this was an improvement on the previous year’s performance in Mathematics, this is still a staggering number, and has been a recurring theme over the years. The underlying question is: Why have these children failed? Given the relative consistency in performance over the years, what is going on in our education system that has been causing thousands of our children to fail in securing the basic education to acquire a decent job? It is public knowledge that the chief culprit has been compensation of teachers. Without a doubt, inadequate compensation has made teaching and delivering the necessary and much-needed care and attention to Guyana’s students a next-to-impossible challenge, with all the ills associated with inadequate compensation already in the public domain.

Teachers know that it is a willful policy of Government to maintain depressed salaries for teachers, and in addition to being demoralized, find it next to impossible to have the energy required to deliver on their mandate of educating our children. To sum it up, the salaries of teachers do not afford them to buy their own home, with the mortgage on a basic two or three bedroom home costing around 7-9 million dollars being $70,000-$90,000 alone, or ten thousand dollars for every million of the value of a home. Even with a rent of thirty thousand dollars monthly, teachers have to cope with traveling, basic food, internet and maintenance costs of their families which always keeps them in the negative every month. Government is well aware that internet charges of $10,000 are now a standard cost for Guyanese homes. For those who are unaware or never thought of it, it is a given that salaries of teachers, all public servants, be a standard of living in societies, where these workers are tasked with performing government service of administering the affairs of the country and servicing the needs of the citizens of the nation. The obvious justification is that Government must ensure that it secures among the best available workers and these workers are adequately compensated.

Paying public servants is not a matter about which governments waste their time. Within the simple context of ethics and governance procedure/framework, it is the right and proper thing to do. It has long been observed also that many public servants have been categorized among Guyana’s working poor, being unable to meet the basic needs of housing, food, clothing, not to mention education for their children in our government-engineered socio-economic tragedy. Given that education happens to be the most transformative force for delivering development by creating a skilled workforce and generating new successful entrepreneurs, it is imperative that government makes the salaries of teachers especially, all public servants, a priority within their economic policy framework. I have long suggested an across-the-board cost of living adjustment, which in light of the rising cost of living, I have now raised to at least $70,000 per month. Government, their ministers, are well aware of the cost of living crisis of teachers, and well know that