Exactly what Caricom heads of government will be doing at their next meeting discussing the CXC Mathematics performance this year is not something which is altogether comprehensible. What specialist knowledge do they have which their Education Ministers and Departments of Education do not have? They are supposed to be advised by their ministers, so why are these not the ones meeting to discuss the problem, following which they could then convey their conclusions to their heads?
The problem with being the head of state is that he or she carries ultimate responsibility for everything the government does. This leads to the temptation to pronounce on all manner of topics, no matter the degree of expertise such commentary might require. And so it was when President Irfaan Ali opened the Yarrowkabra Secondary School last week and held forth at some length on the poor results in CSEC Maths here, and the need for immediate remedial measures.
The pass rate of Grades 1 – 3 in Mathematics fell from 34% in 2023 to 31% in 2024, which was not as poor a result as in some Caribbean territories. Be that as it may, President Ali proved himself quite voluble on the subject of Guyana’s case, where he said we had to be innovative. “I believe that we have to look at how varied scenarios have affected our results in Mathematics … so I’ve asked the Minister of Education … to look globally at what is available as tools, to help us to overcome this challenge,” he was quoted as saying.
One can only conclude he had not communicated with Minister of Education Priya Manickchand before he made this speech, or read her earlier comments at the time the results were announced. On that occasion she had disclosed that Ingrid Fung had been recruited to improve performance levels in English A and B, and in Mathematics. There would be targeted Maths interventions for the students of Forms 4 and 5, she said, that would include providing calculators, exercise books and practice papers. There would also be “rigorous monitoring” by independent inspectors making more school visits, as well as direct classroom observations and greater support for teachers.
Whether President Ali was unaware of these developments or whether he was not impressed by them is not known, but he subsequently launched into an exposition of what he thought was needed to produce critical thinkers equipped with life-learning skillsets. The key, he thought, was digitisation: “The digitisation of our textbooks, the digitisation of our teaching material, the digitisation of our learning material, digitisation of our delivery…” He went on to say that consequently his administration would be investing heavily in the digitisation of education, and that eLearning and online education were important in this scenario. Online education, he said, would ensure there were no gaps or areas where there were imbalances and differences in skillsets.
(He had no comment to make on the stability of our electricity system which would be the sine qua non of any viable digitization programme.)
Where he got all this from was not said, although he did inform his listeners his government was currently looking at three proposals. However, his Education Minister was not quite in synch with this when she had spoken on the occasion of the results’ announcement. She had said that before Covid there had been a great deal of debate about integrating technology into teaching, and the pandemic had allowed the authorities to test this. “We learned a vital lesson,” she went on to say, “while technology can support education, the most effective teaching method still involves a teacher actively guiding students in the classroom.”
She did not rule out a role for technology, she merely said that the best results came from combining technology “with engaging, hands-on instruction from a teacher.” Her approach is much more in line with international research on the subject, which has found among many other things there is a problem of motivation with online learning, and that there are always children who don’t do much, which the President’s approach will not fix. In addition, learning as a group is more effective than one-on-one instruction. Where computer learning can most usefully be deployed, perhaps, is in relation to the teachers, with strategies, lesson plans and help of other kinds.
Some years ago England sent educators to China to find out how they taught Maths, and there was for a time a limited exchange programme. At a national level China’s education system functions poorly, but in provinces like Guangdong and some other places, there are excellent schools which are entered in the PISA tables and score very highly. What the English found was that the methodology in Chinese Maths classrooms was what we would call ‘talk and chalk,’ with no online content.
The English have since learnt to go back to basics and have resuscitated more conventional teacher-directed instruction. It seems to have paid off; in 2009 15-year-olds were 29th in the world in Maths according to PISA, and in 2022 they had risen to 11th in the tables. “Nothing makes more difference to a child’s schooling than the quality of their teachers,” wrote the Economist in an education feature recently.
In other words if the President wants to improve Maths results, then what he will need is a sufficient number of qualified teachers in the field, and at the moment there is a severe shortage of those. The raw ruth is that if the government wants to attract teachers into the profession, then they will have to pay them accordingly. There is no short-cut.
The President did say that the government was investing in our teachers. “We are investing in having higher quality teachers,” he said, “and we are seeing that more of our teachers are becoming graduates, graduate teachers having first degrees, master’s degrees, and even PhDs.” Perhaps the Chief Education Officer could tell the public exactly how many Maths teachers there are in our secondary schools currently, and how many of these are qualified in the subject at degree level. One rather suspects that in the current economic environment anyone with a tertiary Maths qualification will find more remunerative employment outside the teaching profession.
In addition to the need for more quality Maths teachers in the schools the Ministry of Education should bear in mind that remedial measures implemented at the Fourth and Fifth Form levels will not solve the problem on a long-term basis. Learning is an accretive process, and improvement in Form 4 is built on sound teaching way back down the line. Does the Ministry have any comprehensive data on Arithmetic/Mathematics assessments beginning in primary school?
At the opening of Yarrowkabra the President said: “We are here celebrating education, not the building alone, because the infrastructure is just one component of delivering higher quality education … we can have the best environment, we can have the best facilities, but if we also do not invest in the human resources that would help these facilities to manifest the type of results that we’re investing for then we will have a mismatch.” No one will disagree with him on that score.
