It will be recalled that the head teacher of Christianburg Secondary School, Mr Cleveland Thomas, had been summoned to appear before the disciplinary committee of the Teaching Service Commission after failing to follow the guidelines contained in the Ministry of Education circular cited above, and promote all students at the end of the academic year, no matter what grades they received. Teachers and parents from the Linden area had expressed their support for Mr Thomas, some of them in the form of demonstrations in Linden and Georgetown.
At a press briefing on Friday reported in our edition yesterday, Mr Baksh was quoted as saying that the circular “clearly states that we are not going to just [give] automatic promotion,” and despite all the media attention it had received, this “important fact” had not been pointed out. If this was indeed the case, one wonders why he didn’t speak up immediately after the matter involving Mr Thomas was first made public. After all, not just the media, but arguably Mr Thomas himself and the Teaching Service Commission too were labouring under the illusion that automatic promotion was the point at issue.
As it turns out, however, Minister Baksh was only playing with words. “We are saying,” he told the media, “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… It is not an automatic promotion without systems in place.” He subsequently went on to say that given all the resource material in abundance in the schools, and with the adherence to the guidelines a large percentage of students should be moving through the system. We reported him also as telling the media that the needs of every child in the class had to be assessed and certain remediation “effected to bring them up to a certain level.” This, he emphasized, was the responsibility of the school.
So there it is: there is automatic promotion after all, and the onus is on the school to ensure that students who are illiterate and/or innumerate, are functionally illiterate, or are very low achievers “catch up” after they are promoted. If they fail to do so, the fault will lie with the school. (Heaven forbid that it should lie with the Ministry of Education and its policies (or circulars)).
The issue of course hinges as we said last week on exactly what resources the ministry and the regions have made available to enable head teachers to make all these remedial interventions on a continuous basis, but before we come to that, it should be said that Mr Baksh really needs to give the public some figures. Exactly what is the scope of the problem? He talks about it in vague terms, but never actually spells out how many illiterate or functionally illiterate students enter the secondary system from the primary level, exactly how they are distributed across the schools, and how many there are at each grade level in the secondary schools. One presumes that the primary tops and community high schools will face the biggest challenges, but perhaps he could clarify. Furthermore, do some regions have greater problems than others? Just what are the statistics?
The ministry had announced at an earlier stage the introduction of a special remedial class for those who were still illiterate on leaving primary school, after which they would be integrated into the normal secondary classes. Would the Minister care to say how many of these children end their year in this remedial class and still cannot read and write? If this is indeed a problem in a number of schools, the ministry cannot then throw the responsibility back onto the ordinary teaching staff to solve it thereafter; remedying problems of illiteracy and very low literacy becomes harder the older a child is, and invariably requires professional remedial intervention.
There is now a competency certificate as an alternative to the CSEC qualification that includes practical subjects for those disinclined to pursue academic subjects. There is certainly no problem with this, but certain basic skills of literacy and numeracy are required no matter what path a student takes in life, and no one should be studying woodworking or whatever, without being literate and numerate. When the Minister talks about an abundance of resources, therefore, is he referring simply to this relatively new certificate as well as the initial remedial class, or has his ministry put other resources at the disposal of head teachers to enable them to deal with low achievers in all the secondary grades on an ongoing basis?
It might be observed as already mentioned above, that more important than anything else in dealing with teenage illiteracy is trained, or at least, experienced specialists in the field. Exactly how many of those have been deployed in the secondary level schools? Are there enough of them to cope with very low achievers at all grades? If, as said above, the Minister simply expects the ordinary secondary school staff to take over students with special learning difficulties after the first year and accommodate them within the normal class of thirty or whatever, he is simply not serious. As things stand, the education system is very short of competent, qualified teachers, in addition to which discipline is a problem in some urban schools, supplying another constraint on learning. As it is, unless Mr Baksh provides some details, he will open himself to the accusation that he has just set up a formula which will allow him to blame the schools when his scheme fails.
He has now said that the automatic promotion policy will be reviewed in a year or two to see its effect. He had already informed the media that it was introduced in the first place to try and stem the drop-out rate, although exactly how it would achieve that in the absence of ongoing remedial classes was not made clear. Mr Baksh spent some of the time at his briefing lambasting Mr Thomas’s school – some of his complaints related to bureaucratic matters rather than pedagogical ones – and alluded to the poor results of the Grade Nine Assessment there. He subsequently conceded that the school’s CSEC results, however, were of an acceptable standard. “And this is the pint I’m trying to make,” he was quoted as saying, “Automatic promotion has worked.” Well hardly, if it was only instituted this year.
After reciting a list of Christianburg Secondary’s shortcomings (Mr Thomas was the target really), Minister Baksh asked rhetorically, “What kind of school is this?” A more appropriate question would have been perhaps, “What kind of ministry is this?”
