Last week, Chief Education Officer Olato Sam made a public comment on what he asserts is a nexus between teachers’ performance and the weaknesses of children that many teachers, among others, would have considered unfair if not offensive. Indeed, at a time when active public discourse has been ensuing on how we can better incentivize the nation’s teachers as part of a wider focus on improving our education system, the CEO’s remark might even be seen in some quarters as counter-productive.
At the outset, the point should be made that there is no profession in Guyana (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) in which there exists the highest levels of either competence or commitment across the board. That applies as much to the teaching profession as it does to other professions that we can think about, so that it is not a question of all of our teachers being necessarily either equally competent or equally committed. Incidentally, the practice of running down public servants also obtains in other areas of government and all too frequently it is the senior functionaries who find fault with those working under them. Again, it is not a question, in some instances, of there being no pockets of incompetence and inefficiency in the wider public service. The real point here is that we cannot appear to be heaping blame on our public servants when one can point to so many other major stumbling blocks to the efficiency of the public service.
Part of what this newspaper reported Mr Sam to have said was that “many of the weaknesses we see in the children are a reflection of our teachers’ failings.” That is not all that Mr Sam said. However, even taken in isolation from the rest of his presentation, it comes across as a near all-embracing criticism of our teachers and our teaching standards. Indeed, it is not the sort of remark, coming particularly from the professional head of the Ministry of Education that is likely to encourage the average dedicated, hard-working teacher.
The fact, too, that such a remark was made to an audience that comprised scores of primary school heads was insensitive and would almost certainly not have gone down well with Mr Sam’s audience, some of whom might even have been tempted to jump to their feet to challenge him.
The first substantivechallenge to what the CEO had to say derives from part of the response by Mr Mark Lyte, the President of the Guyana Teachers Union. In Mr Lyte’s view what the CEO said was what one might call a ‘cop out’ that appears to ignore altogether the myriad other circumstances that contribute to what Mr Sam says are “the weaknesses we see in the children,” including, Mr Lyte suggests, issues of competence inside the Ministry of Education itself. Indeed, no one who has lived through this country’s education system over recent decades can justifiably challenge Mr Lyte’s assertion that “there are numerous other factors which affect student performance,” not least the chronic structural weaknesses in our education system some of which have attracted critical comment from institutions like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Nor is there any denying that those weaknesses reflect the failure of the state, over those many decades, to deliver a convivial environment for teaching and learning.
Ironically, and in much the same way that the CEO questions the competence of teachers, experienced and retired teaching professionals have themselves challenged the capacity of some of the top tier of the Ministry of Education’s administrative professionals to properly manage the country’s education system. That lack of capacity, the ministry’s critics have said, is itself part of the reason for the failings in the system as a whole which are often blamed on teachers.
One might well reflect, for example, on the low-key nature of this year’s Education Month (September) programme which, in large measure, takes the pattern of its predecessors and appeared to mostly go through the previous motions rather than seek to highlight in various creative ways such positive developments as might have occurred in our education system over the past year or to reflect (again creatively) on social and other currents in our society. Notably, we have seen little if any effort to meaningfully involve parents in the ministry’s Education Month programme.
Mr Sam of all people ‒ now serving as Chief Education Officer under his third Minister of Education ‒ ought to be intimate with all of the warts and carbuncles that interfere with the teaching/learning process in Guyana. He is better-positioned than most to know that it is, to say the least, unfair, to publicly go out on a limb, so to speak, in a manner that does not fully represent the problem and fails, moreover, to properly put into perspective what he calls “the weaknesses we see in the children.”
However valid the arguments about affordability, poor rewards and, often, a deplorable working environment, continue to strangle teacher morale and undermine the ability of the profession to attract and retain a sufficiently large number of the best-qualified young people. There are large numbers of instances in which serving teachers find themselves seeking income subsidies and are therefore, understandably, not wholly focused on their substantive classroom obligations. Try as we might there is no way of debating ourselves out of the conundrum of poor pay in the teaching profession. It is high time that those in authority come to understand that there is something quite wrong with demanding more effort from our teachers without offering reasonable reward. It is only after such reasonable reward becomes available that we can ascend to any sort of moral high ground as far as demanding more of teachers is concerned. There are, after all, tolerable limits to sacrifice.
Add to the aforementioned considerations the limitations in the state’s ability to train teachers, not least what we know to be a scarcity of qualified trainers at the Cyril Potter College of Education, a truth that serving CPCE trainers concede; a dearth of teaching resources in many schools; and the serious discipline-related challenges in the school system arising out of dysfunctional homes and communities.
The CEO knows only too well that as far as fixing the country’s education system is concerned that ball is very much in the government’s court. It is true that our teaching resources are in need of attention but the first serious remedial moves must be made by the Ministry of Education though not in the manner seemingly favoured by the CEO in his remarks last week.
