Dear Editor,
As someone who was trained as an economist, being among the few in Guyana who attended courses sponsored by the IMF’s Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Center (CARTAC), the blame for my extended ten-year stint in the teaching profession is solely mine. This said, with children who are now approaching their CSEC exams, I have had much cause to learn and understand the mechanics of education over the years. My salary aside, I have sought to ensure that all students passing through my hands do their best, this for me being getting Grade Ones not only in the subjects I teach, but in all the subjects they sit. This may sound demanding, but the students I teach happen to be among the most brilliant produced by Guyana, and by extrapolation based on sampling techniques, the world. Indeed, I could say that I have achieved a fair degree of success, with a few being recognized and receiving awards for their performance in the Business Stream over the years, which is the area in which I specialize. This is of course in addition to those who have been achieving a superlative number of Grade Ones at their examinations.
My concern however has always been the general underperformance, in my view, of the national student population. For 2022, given the overall pass rate (Grades 1 to 3) for the general and technical proficiencies was 68.5 percent out of a total of 9,808 students (https://www. stabroeknews.com/2022/09/06/news/guyana/guyana-records-improved-maths-english-performance-at-csec/). This means that around 3,090 students received Grade Four or less. The situation is much worse for Mathematics alone, where only 34.3 percent achieved Grades One to Three. This means that a total of 6,445 students essentially failed mathematics, receiving a Grade IV or less. While it was observed that this was an improvement on the previous year’s performance in Mathematics, this is still a staggering number, and has been a recurring theme over the years. The underlying question is: Why have these children failed? Given the relative consistency in performance over the years, what is going on in our education system that has been causing thousands of our children to fail in securing the basic education to acquire a decent job? It is public knowledge that the chief culprit has been compensation of teachers. Without a doubt, inadequate compensation has made teaching and delivering the necessary and much-needed care and attention to Guyana’s students a next-to-impossible challenge, with all the ills associated with inadequate compensation already in the public domain.
Teachers know that it is a willful policy of Government to maintain depressed salaries for teachers, and in addition to being demoralized, find it next to impossible to have the energy required to deliver on their mandate of educating our children. To sum it up, the salaries of teachers do not afford them to buy their own home, with the mortgage on a basic two or three bedroom home costing around 7-9 million dollars being $70,000-$90,000 alone, or ten thousand dollars for every million of the value of a home. Even with a rent of thirty thousand dollars monthly, teachers have to cope with traveling, basic food, internet and maintenance costs of their families which always keeps them in the negative every month. Government is well aware that internet charges of $10,000 are now a standard cost for Guyanese homes. For those who are unaware or never thought of it, it is a given that salaries of teachers, all public servants, be a standard of living in societies, where these workers are tasked with performing government service of administering the affairs of the country and servicing the needs of the citizens of the nation. The obvious justification is that Government must ensure that it secures among the best available workers and these workers are adequately compensated.
Paying public servants is not a matter about which governments waste their time. Within the simple context of ethics and governance procedure/framework, it is the right and proper thing to do. It has long been observed also that many public servants have been categorized among Guyana’s working poor, being unable to meet the basic needs of housing, food, clothing, not to mention education for their children in our government-engineered socio-economic tragedy. Given that education happens to be the most transformative force for delivering development by creating a skilled workforce and generating new successful entrepreneurs, it is imperative that government makes the salaries of teachers especially, all public servants, a priority within their economic policy framework. I have long suggested an across-the-board cost of living adjustment, which in light of the rising cost of living, I have now raised to at least $70,000 per month. Government, their ministers, are well aware of the cost of living crisis of teachers, and well know that this is not an outrageous amount. Their ministers themselves are beneficiaries of the 50 percent salary increase awarded them by the previous administration. Further, providing such an across-the-board adjustment benefits everyone and is more equitable than any 10-15 percent increase.
Returning to the causes of the failures of our children, a big problem remains the challenges posed by many of our children who come from families living below the poverty line. This can be efficiently addressed by developing an income policy aimed at eliminating poverty in Guyana, and include working with unions and employers to ensure that workers receive the minimum wage, which I have long proposed should be in the $125,000/ month range. Again, this is not an outrageous figure. Workers must be receiving this amount to get out of the government-engineered poverty in which we live. With respect to teachers, I can only say I know and understand their struggles, the choices they face. I know they have every justification to underperform. However, I urge them to adopt my strategy of doing the impossible, which is much more difficult with the students in their care. Teachers know their criterion of success: that the child knows, understands and can apply their learned knowledge to get above 90 percent in non-CSEC classes, and Grade Ones at CSEC. Teachers know that completing the syllabus is not the goal. Getting 90 percent and above, Grade Ones are. As tough as I know it is, this is the mission, the vision I share with them, if only to make our children the successes we know they all are, and to feel accomplished at overcoming the impossible.
If they find this too hard a task, teachers are encouraged for the sake of their own welfare to seek employment in the private sector, look for teaching jobs abroad, or even change professions. But I urge them to make it unacceptable to have our children fail. I am well aware of the proverbial bell curve. Subscribing to this, rational as it is, justifies their failure, but is invalidated when teachers do not do everything in their power to break children’s barriers. My analysis is as follows: It is not our children who have failed – it is our teachers who have failed them. It is not our children, our teachers who have failed. It is our government which has failed them. Finally, teachers need to understand that in addition to being able to work, they must also be able to demand and get the compensation due them. They need to know that in our dirty game of national politics, their union has been engineered to fail them. And the Union has been playing along all the time. This is because, according to one Nigel Baptiste of the Teachers’ union, the existing agreement between the union and the government has been crafted so that there can be no move to arbitration unless the government agrees, which they have shown they will never do. (I have sought an audience with both the President and General Secretary of the Union to hold further discussions without success.)
The Union under this agreement is just a puppet, a toothless lion, a waste of time, in our colloquial sense, since it cannot unilaterally move to arbitration, which it should be able to do. Protests have also been shown to be a waste of time. I have suggested that this matter be addressed in our courts at our meetings, with the Union asking the court to find the existing contract void since it unfairly represents the interests of teachers. The union can further ask the court to set aside the contract and, in light of government’s willful intransigence, to fairly and meaningfully address teachers’ salaries over the years, instruct the government to immediately proceed to arbitration. The Union must also ask the court to instruct the government to make the arbitration decision retroactive to the year in which government first unilaterally imposed their salary increases for teachers. Either the union moves to the courts, or teachers will have to establish another representative body to execute this action, and defund the existing union. Teachers working for at least ten years are owed an estimated six million dollars or more, with those working since the unilateral salary imposition due much more, not to mention former teachers, families of deceased teachers.
The Union itself has the glaring issue of conflict of interest in which its General Secretary has been appointed to parliament, but still retains the GS portfolio. This is an example of the outrageous attitude to managing teachers’ welfare matters, because there is no way that McDonald as an APNU parliamentarian can be seen to have an unbiased interest in Teachers’ affairs, a situation also obviously about which the APNU is happy with, and which the General Secretary is quite happy to play along with. Teachers need to see that this is the kind of eye-pass, disrespect and abuse they have had to put up with over the decades. They themselves alone can stop this abuse. Government for itself is encouraged to do much introspection, because there is room for improvement in the delivery of public education, health, all other public services. They should consider that they have impoverished teachers, and robbed them and their children of better lives. It is time teachers received the money due them. And their children compensated.
Sincerely,
Craig Sylvester