‘I don’t care what you teach and how you teach it. All I want is for my child to pass.’ Once we do not take this comment too literally, I believe that the parent saying this is representative of most of those who have school aged children. Yet, ‘For almost a hundred years, educators have been at war with each other over what the nature of the … school curriculum should be.’ Underlying this war are four curriculum ideologies … that advocate very different purposes for schooling and very different methods of achieving those respective purposes’ (http://www.sagepub.com/sites/ default/files/ upm-binaries/47669_ch_1.pdf).
This year the ministry of education contracted the Caribbean Examinations Council to conduct the grade six examinations in Guyana and the thoughts in the preceding paragraph came to mind as I considered the following statement. ‘The basis of assessment used by the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) was