Minster of Education Shaik Baksh said yesterday that the automatic promotion policy was put in place after a survey throughout secondary schools in the country found that on average 80 percent of students who were made to repeat a class later dropped out of school.
Defending the policy during a press briefing in the boardroom of the Ministry of Education on Brickdam, Baksh clarified that there was no such thing as a ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy in the ministry. “We have no such stipulated policy in the Ministry of Education. That is an American policy initiative by the Bush administration,” he said.
However, he pointed out that a circular titled ‘Grade Repetition Retention and Automatic Promotion’ was distributed among schools by the Chief Education Officer in May of this year and it “clearly states that we are not going to just [give] automatic promotion”. According to Baksh with all the attention the policy has been receiving recently in the media, it failed to point out this important fact.
“We are saying that whilst you promote the child the school has the responsibility of developing interventions, strong remediation, continuous remediation to ensure that those children catch up so to speak,” Baksh explained. “It is not an automatic promotion without systems in place,” he added.
The automatic promotion policy gained media attention last month when Linden’s Christianburg Secondary School Head Teacher Cleveland Thomas was summoned before the Teaching Service Commission for not promoting low achievers.
“The ministry has reviewed its policy on repetition because we have found from our survey across the secondary schools of Guyana… that the grade repetition of students has been quite dysfunctional and it has led to a high dropout rate of those repeaters. In other words repeating a grade has not worked to the benefit of those repeaters and has failed,” Baksh added.
The survey he referred to was done over three years and captured eight of the 11 education districts across the country including two of the five schools in Region Ten. According to Assistant Chief Education Officer Secondary Melcita Bovell, the survey found that on average 80% of school dropouts was as a result of repetition of a class. Further, more boys were found repeating a class than girls among other things.
Meanwhile, the minister slammed the Christianburg Secondary head teacher for several breaches saying that the ministry will have to investigate the school. “There have been so many breaches and it is the intention of the ministry to call on that head to explain those breaches,” said Baksh.
The minister, reading from an October report on the secondary schools monitored in education district 10 pointed out that the school “did not prepare and implement any action plans to address weakness observed in the learners’ performances at the national or regional examinations and this is the crux of it.”
Baksh said the school has failed the students by not doing so. “You have to ensure that you do a diagnostic work assessment so that you can better remedy and cater for the individual needs of those students.”
According to the report, the minister said: “In the area of management, it states here Christianburg Secondary School prepared its plan for the academic year 2010 but there is no plan for this school year. How are you running a school without the work plans?”
The report also found that teachers were not appraised, minutes were not taken at meetings, there were no staff development sessions, there was no adherence to the standard operational procedures, among other things.
It is the school’s responsibility to look and cater for the varying needs of the individual, Baksh added. “What kind of school is this?” Baksh questioned.
According to Baksh at this year’s Grade Nine assessment at the school, of the 134 students that were part of the assessment only six obtained 50 per cent or more. “Should we have the 128 students repeat the class then?” he questioned.
“Our experience has showed that although students have fallen below the score or the marks that by the time the two years it takes for them to do the CSEC examinations a lot of them come up to scratch. A lot of them reach the acceptable standard. And that has happened at the Christianburg Secondary School; they have an acceptable pass rate. And this is the point I’m trying to make. Automatic promotion has worked.”
Baksh stressed that if schools adhered to the guidelines and with all the resource material in abundance in the schools the largest percentage of students should be moving through the system. However, he said that the needs of every child in the class must be assessed and certain remediation “effected to bring them up to a certain level”. This, he reiterated, is the responsibility of the school.
According to Baksh, the automatic promotion policy will be reviewed a year or two later to see its effect. In the meantime, he called on all teachers and parents in Linden to “come on board”.
