Teachers alone can stop their abuse

this is not an outrageous amount. Their ministers themselves are beneficiaries of the 50 percent salary increase awarded them by the previous administration. Further, providing such an across-the-board adjustment benefits everyone and is more equitable than any 10-15 percent increase.

Returning to the causes of the failures of our children, a big problem remains the challenges posed by many of our children who come from families living below the poverty line. This can be efficiently addressed by developing an income policy aimed at eliminating poverty in Guyana, and include working with unions and employers to ensure that workers receive the minimum wage, which I have long proposed should be in the $125,000/ month range. Again, this is not an outrageous figure. Workers must be receiving this amount to get out of the governmentengineered poverty in which we live. With respect to teachers, I can only say I know and understand their struggles, the choices they face. I know they have every justification to underperform. However, I urge them to adopt my strategy of doing the impossible, which is much more difficult with the students in their care. Teachers know their criterion of success: that the child knows, understands and can apply their learned knowledge to get above 90 percent in non-CSEC classes, and Grade Ones at CSEC. Teachers know that completing the syllabus is not the goal. Getting 90 percent and above, Grade Ones are. As tough as I know it is, this is the mission, the vision I share with them, if only to make our children the successes we know they all are, and to feel accomplished at overcoming the impossible.

If they find this too hard a task, teachers are encouraged for the sake of their own welfare to seek employment in the private sector, look for teaching jobs abroad, or even change professions. But I urge them to make it unacceptable to have our children fail. I am well aware of the proverbial bell curve. Subscribing to this, rational as it is, justifies their failure, but is invalidated when teachers do not do everything in their power to break children’s barriers. My analysis is as follows: It is not our children who have failed - it is our teachers who have failed them. It is not our children, our teachers who have failed. It is our government which has failed them. Finally, teachers need to understand that in addition to being able to work, they must also be able to demand and get the compensation due them. They need to know that in our dirty game of national politics, their union has been engineered to fail them. And the Union has been playing along all the time. This is because, according to one Nigel Baptiste of the Teachers’ union, the existing agreement between the union and the government has been crafted so that there can be no move to arbitration unless the government agrees, which they have shown they will never do. (I have sought an audience with both the President and General Secretary of the Union to hold further discussions without success.)

The Union under this agreement is just a puppet, a toothless lion, a waste of time, in our colloquial sense, since it cannot unilaterally move to arbitration, which it should be able to do. Protests have also been shown to be a waste of time. I have suggested that this matter be addressed in our courts at our meetings, with the Union asking the court to find the existing contract void since it unfairly represents the interests of teachers. The union can further ask the court to set aside the contract and, in light of government’s willful intransigence, to fairly and meaningfully address teachers’ salaries over the years, instruct the government to immediately proceed to arbitration. The Union must also ask the court to instruct the government to make the arbitration decision retroactive to the year in which government first unilaterally imposed their salary increases for teachers. Either the union moves to the courts, or teachers will have to establish another representative body to execute this action, and defund the existing union. Teachers working for at least ten years are owed an estimated six million dollars or more, with those working since the unilateral salary imposition due much more, not to mention former teachers, families of deceased teachers.

The Union itself has the glaring issue of conflict of interest in which its General Secretary has been appointed to parliament, but still retains the GS portfolio. This is an example of the outrageous attitude to managing teachers’ welfare matters, because there is no way that McDonald as an APNU parliamentarian can be seen to have an unbiased interest in Teachers’ affairs, a situation also obviously about which the APNU is happy with, and which the General Secretary is quite happy to play along with. Teachers need to see that this is the kind of eye-pass, disrespect and abuse they have had to put up with over the decades. They themselves alone can stop this abuse. Government for itself is encouraged to do much introspection, because there is room for improvement in the delivery of public education, health, all other public services. They should consider that they have impoverished teachers, and robbed them and their children of better lives. It is time teachers received the money due them. And their children compensated.