While following the announcement of the Grade Six Assessment results, great emphasis was placed on the creditable achievements of the top candidates, nothing was said by the Ministry of Education about the overall performance of the student body as a whole. No figures were disclosed over the course of the succeeding months either, and the public quickly surmised that the silence of the authorities on the subject signified embarrassment. Although it may have come as something of a surprise, therefore, that last week’s budget was selected as the vehicle to reveal a few details concerning this year’s Grade Six performance, the substance of what Minister of Finance Winston Jordan had to say hardly took anyone aback.
The Minister told the House on Monday that of the 14,386 students who sat the 2016 Grade Six Assessment in Mathematics, only 2,014 of them, or 14% achieved a pass grade, and what was equally depressing, less than 50% passed English ‒ the pass grade seemingly being 50%. Mr Jordan described these results as representing a crisis, since “over 12,000 of our children were not numerate, while more than half of those writing English could not sufficiently comprehend our official language to attain a 50 per cent score.”
Of course, we still do not have a full breakdown, so we do not know, for example, how many of our pupils in the Grade Six cohort are to all intents and purposes, totally illiterate and innumerate. As has been noted before, there have been periods in the past when the public was provided with such data. The most recent comparison we have for the limited figures given by Minister Jordan, however, were those supplied in 2014, when then Education Minister Priya Manickchand said that there had been a decline in the Maths pass rate from 43.94% in 2013 to 31.52% that year. This decline, it seems, was greater among girls than boys. All that can be remarked is that from this year’s figures, it appears that Mathematics continues on its relentless downward trend.
Three months after the release of this year’s Grade Six results, a press release from the Ministry of the Presidency, no less, made known Cabinet’s perturbation over the 2016 Maths results – although as mentioned above, no figures were provided. Cabinet had deliberated on the matter at its Tuesday meeting, the statement said, regarding it as one of “extreme urgency and grave national importance.”
According to the release, the Ministry of Education and its technical advisors had been called upon to identify the appropriate steps needed to remedy the situation, steps which included, “remedial training of teachers, better and more varied text books, more teaching aids and better use of technology in the delivery of education.” In addition to these proposals not being overly revolutionary, they have also been advanced before by one or another minister tasked with reversing the slide of the nation’s young into innumeracy.
There is one thing, however, which it is important to note about this year’s dismal Maths – and English ‒ results, and that is for the first time the Ministry of Education contracted the Caribbean Examinations Council to run the Assessment for Grade Six. The Ministry of the Presidency acknowledged the changed character of the exam: “The basis of assessment used by the Caribbean Examinations Council,” it said, “was radically different from what was used previously by the Ministry of Education. This year there was an increased focus on reasoning and a decreased emphasis on retention.”
Certainly this change appears to have unsettled not a few students. We had earlier reported that they had complained about the challenges of the papers which had caused some of them to hand in their scripts unfinished. Exactly what, in practical terms, this meant in terms of changes to the syllabus, the mode of teaching and the character of the examination was not stated, but there seems little doubt that a number of students were unprepared for the new approach, and by extension, therefore, clearly so were their teachers.
For his part Minister Jordan told Parliament that Cabinet had approved the expenditure of $48.6 million on an emergency strategy to improve Maths performance at Grade Six. Among other things, it will address the training of teachers in content and methodology; the facilitation of fortnightly cluster meetings in all the regions; the recruitment of Maths co-ordinators and monitors; the training of officers and school administrators to supervise the teaching of the subject; parental involvement in the project and the acquisition of support materials.
One can only hope that the training of teachers, in addition to anything else, means ensuring that all Grade Six educators are au fait with what is required for the new Assessment, so that those children who will take the exam in 2017 will not be as nonplussed as some of their 2016 predecessors when they see the papers. As for the recruitment of co-ordinators, monitors and the like, one can only observe that it has proved difficult to recruit sufficient competent Mathematics teachers to put in the classrooms in the past, so what luck the Education Ministry will have hiring enough monitors, etc, to supervise the teachers, remains to be seen.
Then there is the issue of parental involvement, which the Ministry should not be overly optimistic about. The reality is that in general, middle class parents are interested in their child’s education without any prompting from the authorities, but there are many poorer parents in contrast, who are themselves barely literate and numerate, or are single and work impossible hours, or who just don’t see the point of education. It will entail hard work to bring them into the education process in its larger sense.
Finally, there is the more technical question of methods. It has been reported in the Daily Mail online, among others, that half of English primary schools will adopt the traditional Chinese method of Maths teaching, in a government effort to stop British youngsters falling behind their Asian counterparts. They will ditch ‘child-centred’ styles and instead return to repetition, drills and ‘chalk and talk’ whole-class learning, said the Daily Mail.
The paper reported that critics blamed ‘progressive’ teaching styles that focused on applying Maths to real-life scenarios in an effort to make the subject more interesting, as being responsible for the lag of three years between Shanghai children and their British counterparts. This was because it had led to confusion and stopped children learning the basics. “Under the government’s new plans,” said the Mail, “children as young as five will have drills to practise sums and exercises, and must master each concept through repetition before moving to the next.
Could it be, one wonders, that Guyana schools are just too ‘progressive’ for their own good when it comes to Mathematics, and that an appeal to the Chinese for some help might not come amiss?
