A recent report from the Teaching Service Commission (TSC) paints a pretty disparaging picture of aspects of the country’s education system particularly as this relates to discipline amongst teachers, including some head teachers. Simultaneously, the contents of the report would appear to suggest that the Ministry of Education is hard-pressed to halt the slide in so far as the management of schools is concerned.
The issues raised in the TSC’s report include high levels of teacher lateness and absenteeism, seeming underperformance on the parts of head teachers and instances of unbecoming familiarity between students and teachers. None of these are exactly well-kept secrets, though coming from the TSC, their publication lays bare some serious fault lines in our education system.
As far as the problem of indiscipline amongst teachers is concerned the situation – in the opinion of the TSC – degenerated to a point where 113 teachers had to be dismissed last year for one reason or another. That is an alarming disclosure, to say the least.
The announced demotion and transfer of the three head teachers is deeply worrying. It amounts to a concession that some heads of schools are not competent to hold the office that they do. Part of the disciplinary penalty requires that they be assigned to other schools under what the TSC describes as “good Head Teachers.” Does this raise questions about the soundness of the selection procedures in the first place? The second reason has to do with the fact that three, presumably more competent individuals, must be found to replace the demoted ones from what, presumably, is a limited pool. That too gives reason for concern.
We begin, of course, by assuming that the TSC acted within the limits of its authority and that the sanctioned teachers got a fair hearing, though we note that the TSC makes no reference to what must almost certainly have been an unfolding pattern of slippage in standards of teacher discipline and schools’ management standards as a whole, an assessment that would certainly have raised questions that the ministry would have been required to answer. Here, the question that arises – and one that has been raised before in this newspaper – has to do with the extent to which the ministry has been able, over the years to fashion and implement a regime of schools’ management that effectively addresses some of those very areas of weakness identified by the TSC.
No one is suggesting that the TSC should not address those disciplinary cases which are put before it, but surely its reporting on the outcomes ought to seek to address root causes and remedial strategies and this is where a conversation with the ministry comes in.
The argument that there is a serious official deficiency in terms of applying successful interventions to remedy the anomalies in our education system has been made time and again. We already know much about the ongoing problems of scarcity of critical teaching and learning resources, violence among schoolchildren and in schools, intimidated teachers and instances of indifferent and indisciplined parents. None of these shortcomings has been satisfactorily addressed.
There are bound to be varying responses to the TSC’s decision to demote and transfer the head teachers. The commission will doubtless see justification in drawing a line in the sand, so to speak. It will almost certainly make the point about the prevalence of shortcomings amongst teachers, including head teachers, and what it sees as the need to take more assertive action to halt the slide.
There is another side to the coin. Experienced teachers, including head teachers make reference to a ‘disconnect’ between the ministry and teachers, between the bureaucrats who impose a system that is in need of overhaul and a cadre of teachers who must make a broken system work. The teachers have no say in shaping the rules that drive that system, and in many instances, have been thoroughly beaten down by the pressures of having to work in what, frequently, is a hostile environment under conditions of service that they have grown to detest. The tendency to circumvent the issue of the failure on the part of the Ministry of Education, over many years, to repair some of the more glaring faults in the education system often leads all too easily to a demonizing of teachers over problems that have their roots, mostly, in a broken system rather than in the teachers themselves. That has to end. The magnitude of the responsibilities assigned to heads of schools and teachers has to be matched by the availability of the requisite tools and a convivial environment that maximizes the opportunity for them to perform effectively. Then and only then can their performances be judged with a reasonable measure of objectivity.