We have not yet heard any kind of analysis from the Ministry of Education in relation to this year’s Grade Six Assessment; so far, all that we’ve learnt concerns the top performers and the top schools. While those who have done well and the schools from which they come deserve every bit of the attention they have received, their success does not tell us anything about general trends. And the public needs to know what the overall performance has been like, and whether there are any glimmerings of an improvement over previous years. There certainly won’t be any dramatic advances on last year – at least if there were it would throw the results into doubt, since it takes time for inputs into an educational system to bear fruit. Education by its very nature is a cumulative process, and changes work their way through a system slowly.
In the past Minister Baksh has been commendably frank with the public about some of the problems in education, more particularly those related to literacy. And he has also been commendably frank about the underperformance of so many of the candidates who sat the previous Grade Six Assessment, and before it, the SSEE or Common Entrance. While inexplicably, a small percentage of the marks from the Grades Two and Four Assessments are now added to the Grade Six marks to obtain the final result, the last-mentioned examination nevertheless remains identical in content and approach to its SSEE predecessor, and in a general sense, therefore, the results of the two can still be compared. While admittedly the exam is perhaps a somewhat crude indicator of attainment levels, nevertheless, there is no mistaking the fact that in recent years it has unmasked just how poorly some of our primary schools – and not just the pupils – have been performing.
There are of course all kinds of things working against the ministry in its efforts to raise educational standards, not all them directly related to education per se. They include the ubiquity of television and video games; the general indiscipline in the society; truancy; the get-rich-quick culture which hardly sees education as necessary; the decline in the work ethic; the significant number of single mothers who have to work long hours to feed their children and who are consequently not able to supervise them; a lack of parental support for the educational process, and so on. But if one single factor were to be isolated as the key contributor to the decline it would have to be the chronic shortage of qualified and/or experienced teachers.
The recent advertisements for some fairly senior posts in our educational institutions are an indication of the continuing severe shortage of teachers. By the time the new school year rolls around, we will have a much fuller picture of the extent of the staff deficit, and one suspects that once again it will be major. It is not that the government hasn’t put money into teacher training at one level or another, but the truth remains that we are by-and-large training for export. The best teachers are siphoned off to other places or other professions, and on-the-job training, or the training of young teachers with a poor educational foundation is not an adequate replacement for the skills which have been lost.
The long and the short of the issue is that if the government cannot pay teachers salaries that are competitive – at least with other Caricom territories – then it will not be able to retain them. It is low salaries, in fact, which are considered largely responsible for the departure of males from the profession, and this, it has been argued, has had deleterious consequences for boys’ education both in terms of results, discipline and the absence of positive role models in their lives.
The government – as governments are wont to do – has often repeated how much it has increased the remuneration for teachers over the years. But that is not the point. The point is that given the environment the pay will not induce them to stay, and neither will it attract competent people into the profession in the first instance.
Unfortunately it has to be said that some of those (certainly not all) teaching today are hardly shining examples of conscientious, committed educators whose first concern is ensuring that their charges learn and that they develop whatever talents they have. This problem is a reflection of several things which are wrong in the system, but one of them simply is that there will be a greater reluctance on the part of heads to complain about a teacher to the ministry for referral to the Teaching Service Commission if there is no one on the horizon to replace them. And in most cases, there really isn’t.
The salary scales have produced another negative spin-off effect, and that is the extra-lessons syndrome, whereby serving teachers try to augment their income. There have been many complaints from parents in the past that certain teachers refuse to teach during working hours, in order to force their pupils to attend their extra lessons after hours. Now that the ministry has included a percentage of marks from the Grades Two and Four Assessments in the final calculations for the Grade Six Assessment, they have exposed very much younger children to the extra lessons phenomenon.
The reasons why the government does not want to treat the teachers as a special case in terms of pay, are well known and not without merit. However, if the future of the nation depends on the quality of its education system – and it does – then the administration has to begin to think far more imaginatively on the subject than it has in the past, despite the limiting nature of the last agreement struck with the Guyana Teachers Union.