Dear Editor,
With respect, I think your headline: ‘Lower criteria proposed for entry to teachers’ training college -during consultation on new standards’ somewhat misses the mark.
You see, the present entry requirements for the teachers’ training college are five CSEC subjects with grades 1 to 3, including English and Mathe-matics. This is in accord with the CSEC recommendations that grades 1 to 3 be considered acceptable for employment purposes. Each grade obtained by a candidate has attached to it an explanation of the sub-grade earned in each of the features being assessed for that subject.
In that way, an employer who is faced with an applicant who has (say) grade 4 in a subject may wish to consider that applicant favourably if the applicant had scored highly on some feature that the employer prizes highly, but rather poorly on other features assessed by CSEC.
The proposal in the Draft Standards for Tea-cher Education is to raise the entry requirements for the teachers’ training college to five CSEC subjects with grades 1 to 2, including English and Mathe-matics. What the teachers who spoke on this aspect of the matter were suggesting during the consultation was that, in view of the shortage of qualified teachers of Mathematics, the current requirement of grades 1 to 3 in Mathe-matics be retained for now, but that the upward shift to grades 1 to 2 in English was quite acceptable. They were not proposing any lowering of the criteria, hence the text of the otherwise well-written news report was a bit off the mark in respect of grasping the nuances of this technical issue.
As I understand it, the document: Guyana’s Draft Standards for Teacher Education is available on the Ministry of Education’s website at www.education.gov.gy, and the ministry is welcoming comments and suggestions from education practitioners both current and retired, education thinkers, persons with an interest in education, parents and guardians and other members of the general public.
I urge everyone to participate.
Yours faithfully,
George N Cave
