This country has some remarkable top CSEC students. While comparative data with the rest of the region has not yet been announced, it is not unreasonable to suppose that some of them will secure awards for individual subjects, given their astonishing results.
The spectacular successes of the high-flyers, however, masks problems further down the line. The one that everyone from the President down seems fixated on, is the less than stellar results in Mathematics. As we reported last week candidates who sat the CSEC Maths exam from 2015 to 2023 recorded a pass rate below 50%. That broke down into a 45.07% pass rate in 2015; 38.37% in 2016; 39.23% in 2017; 43% in both 2018 and 2019; 39.43% in 2020; 31.6% in 2021; 34.6% in 2022; and now 39.87% in 2023. The poor results between 2020 and 2022 may well be explained by the Covid situation, and the after effects of that may also be reflected in this year’s results.
That notwithstanding it still has to be recognised that even from well before the pandemic more than half of the candidates who sat down to take the CXC Maths exam could not be expected to pass. This, therefore, is not a new issue, and there have been several attempts to confront it before. One of the more ambitious was in 2017, when Guyana and the World Bank signed a US$13.3 million loan agreement focusing on Maths teaching in schools and the training of 6,500 teachers. In a statement at the time the Ministry of Finance referred to the “significant challenges” presented by the “low quality of teaching and learning at all levels and inequalities in learning outcomes.”
There does not seem to have been any assessment of the success or otherwise of this project, although in an anecdotal sense the impression is that its impact has been a great deal less than expected. There have been other approaches too, usually taking the form of exposing children to more Maths lessons in schools, and in its previous incarnations this government has also been involved in attempting solutions.
So now here we are in 2023 with nothing having changed much, and with President Irfaan Ali saying in Tuschen last week that the government was very concerned and there would be a more targeted approach to the subject. “We cannot continue with existing pass grades in [CSEC] Mathematics. It is unacceptable and we must change it and will change it,” he was quoted as saying. It is not a novel undertaking in terms of presidential commitments where Maths passes or the lack of them are concerned.
His proposals ranged from additional compulsory hours being devoted to teaching Maths in secondary schools especially at exam level, to moving to see what tool was available in terms of artificial intelligence. AI, he said, should be incorporated “into the delivery of learning outcomes for Mathematics.” The agency tasked with producing such a programme was inevitably the Ministry of Education, which the President said would come up with a comprehensive plan in two weeks.
Anything involving coming up with proposals which would include incorporating AI into the teaching of Maths, must have left not a few officials at the Ministry gasping in disbelief. Exactly how is that to be conceived let alone implemented? What does it have to do in the current circumstances with imparting mathematical concepts to children that online learning and plain old-fashioned teaching can’t? More Maths lessons for students, on the other hand, are well within the ambit of the Ministry’s experience, although whether this is achievable given the size and quality of the teaching complement is entirely another matter.
As for Secretary of the Teachers’ Union Coretta McDonald, to whom this newspaper spoke, she proposed firstly, a reduction in class size in order to bring it down to a number a teacher could control. In the case of Maths therefore, a class of 25 might be divided into two or three so that attention could be given to those who are weak. She did acknowledge, however, that this would spell a need for additional and specialised teachers as well as resources to facilitate innovative ways of teaching. Furthermore, she said, there would be a need for diagnostics to establish the stage which students had reached, and that this would have to be undertaken in Grade Seven.
The second thing she recommended was more practical work because, she said, “Math is not a subject where you can decide you just go to the chalkboard and write or you send them to read something …”
Owing to the fact that you have to practise all the time, the extra hours would mean that you might have to cut down on some of the other subjects. Change, she went on, would only be seen over time.
The President and Ms McDonald both seem to consider that innovation is the way to go, although data from the international arena does not suggest that this necessarily brings results. The nation whose best schools (not the education system as a whole) pre-pandemic topped the international league tables in Mathematics was China, and it used very old-fashioned teaching methods popularly known as chalk and talk. The English authorities were so interested they had an exchange programme at one stage to see what they could learn from it, although given the interruption of the pandemic and the current state of relations between the two countries one doubts that would have any hope of being revived.
As for reducing class sizes from 25, outside research suggests that this would make no difference to educational outcomes, while there should on principle be resistance to cutting the time allowance for other subjects in favour of Maths. Adding compulsory extra hours onto the school day for Mathematics teaching is one thing, keeping the same school day and reducing the time allotment for other subjects quite another.
In any case as experience has shown, extra hours, smaller classes and the like will not produce any dramatic results. At the bottom of our problem is a deficit of competent Maths teachers, and that has been the case for decades. Prior to the pandemic our Diaspora column carried a piece by an education researcher, who also referred to similar findings by an earlier researcher four years earlier. The loss of qualified teachers from the public education system to which the writer referred is very well known, but the article also described how the deterioration in that system had “downgraded the quality of the individuals accepted into and graduating from the teacher training programmes.”
As a consequence, there were, it was said, “serious flaws in the capabilities of individuals graduating from the teacher education programmes at the Cyril Potter College (CPC) and the University of Guyana (UG) … So, even if there were policies governing how to respond to teacher attrition, including funding to cover the costs of long and short-term replacements, this would not solve the problems relating to the recruitment of qualified personnel.” It might be observed that where Mathematics specifically is concerned even some developed countries have difficulty recruiting enough qualified teachers for their schools, let alone Guyana.
As has been oft repeated, education is a cumulative process, and it takes a long time to change trends. This is unfortunate for politicians, who are addicted to immediate results, and who expect that if they decree extra hours or more teaching innovations or the like, exceptional improvements will occur soon thereafter. They probably won’t.
Furthermore, they will not achieve dramatic outcomes when they concentrate on the examination years alone, although with intensive sessions led by good teachers they may upgrade the CSEC results of those with some innate level of mathematical flair. While even that has something to recommend it, they will not be able to rescue the weaker students by this method. That process starts with the youngest at the beginning of primary school and ideally nursery school, and if pupils are not well taught at that stage and subsequently, outside research suggests it is difficult to make good the deficit. So President Ali’s proposals better start looking too at the quality of instruction for our smallest children.
So what is the solution to our problem of poor Maths results at CSEC in an age where all the emphasis is on STEM subjects? The short answer is sufficient competent teachers. The country which appears regularly at the top or very near the top of the international league tables is Finland, which makes no special arrangements in terms of class sizes, or arranging pupils in terms of ability, or technological aids or the like. What it does is pay its teachers more than most if not all other nations, so it attracts highly competent people into its teaching ranks.
If President Ali would stop running around the country asking teachers what they want and instead have his Ministers of Finance and Education sit down with the union to work out the kind of salaries, etc, which would really attract competent people into the profession, then he would be making an important first step in improving all kinds of exam results here, as well as education in general in its old-fashioned sense. That, it is admitted, will not have immediate results, but longer-term ones, so in the short term he will have to ask the Ministry of Education to devise in company with various stakeholders some stop-gap measures. These should, however, be realistic, without a technological fantasy element, although not necessarily excluding online learning elements, particularly those which could help the teacher, and without interfering with other subjects or reducing class sizes for which the teachers do not exist.
