Most teachers and school managers at a public consultation arranged by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Berbice last week expressed opposition towards the MOE’S automatic promotion policy.
Several teachers and headteachers shared their views on the issue and the session, a first in a series of nationally- held forums, was attended by the Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, and other senior officers within the MOE as well as the Region 6 Education Department. The forum also looked closely at the national remediation programme in which low- performing students remain for one hour after school for extra classes in Math and English.
Automatic promotion promotes all students even those who have failed their annual examinations written at the end of each school year. For a couple of years now, students are being promoted whether they had gained the pass scores. This has not found favour with many stakeholders including teachers and some parents.
Manickchand, a few months ago, had promised to review the policy and the public consultations is the first step.
In a PowerPoint Presentation to dozens of headteachers and teachers at the New Amsterdam Secondary School (NAMS) Multi- Purpose Hall, Manickchand noted that the policy on Automatic Promotion “was arrived at after extensive research, debate and consultation”. She added that the policy should not be “likened” to the No Child Left Behind Policy which was implemented in the United States. This issue, she revealed, does not affect the primary system that much as it does the secondary system, since the number of primary repeaters is small and is being addressed through other interventions.
A UNESCO study in 2006, she noted, concluded that grade repetition “brings extra costs and long term negative academic and social consequences” to students, the teachers, parents and the government. The Ministry of Education and Community Development in Suriname, in 2004, also did a similar study on the issue.
In 2009, a World Bank Report showed the rate of repetition in Suriname at 18 per cent and she noted that repetition in Guyana’s classrooms “did little to improve student performance and students were just made to repeat with no additional support and ran a higher failure rate and poor grades …sink or swim mentality which saw failure [as the] students’ fault”. Manickchand noted that there were few strategies that existed to improve pass- rates and that failure was not always the result of students’ actions but was caused by teacher absence, etc.
However, one teacher from the Canje Secondary School asked the ministry to conduct some of the research in Berbice since “if we are going to do research in Guyana, if we can do for all ten regions, because we have all kinds of problems…nobody will come to Berbice to see what is going on or even in Essequibo to see what the students are doing”. She said that she would love for the researchers from the World Bank and MOE to “come to every school” and conduct research on the automatic promotion policy and other policies that the MOE adopts.
The matter of Parent Conferences was also addressed as well as Remediation programmes for students who perform poorly in school.
Teachers and headteachers shared their views on the matter. Almost every person who did share views opposed automatic promotions. One teacher from the JC Chandisingh Secondary School noted that when there are Parent Conferences at his school, “the parents who we really want to see don’t show up and there is nothing we can do to get those parents”. Speaking about Automatic Promotions, he noted that “children used to have an incentive for working to be promoted…we use to see better results”. While he understood the aims of the Automatic Promotion policy, he said that it was not working and “we as teachers have a hard task relating it to the students and that getting to the parents— so at the end of the day, the children know there are no penalties for not working”. He said that when they would call the parents, “they [the parents] are too busy so our hands are tied, and I would suggest that we need to revisit it and to look at what we can actually do to get these parents, if not, to revert to what it was”.
Similar consultations are scheduled for other parts of Guyana so that the MOE can have all of the input of other educators to revisit the automatic promotion policy in terms of either a reverse or revamp.
