Guest Editorial
President Irfaan Ali’s recent comment embracing concerns over Guyana’s performance or underperformance at Mathematics based on the recently released results of this year’s CXC examinations and his call for an urgent probe into what he rightly appears to believe is the country’s decided math’s deficit comes against the backdrop of previously expressed concerns over what is now seen across the region as an obdurate crisis that refuses to go away with the passage of time.
What the President has had to say on the matter will almost certainly not go unnoticed across the region. What ought to arise from what the President had to say about the country’s performance at CXC Math this year is, first, some kind of local professional contemplation followed by a similar regional discourse. The problem here, of course, is that whenever these kinds of challenges surface in the region the temptation, invariably, has been to opt for open-ended ‘talk shops’ that go nowhere. Here, it would seem that the local extent of the crisis does not afford us the luxury of travelling that road again.
A stage has long been reached where Guyana’s (and the region’s) underperformance at CXC mathematics has come to be regarded as a precursor to a likely longer term challenge that may well, in the absence of sustained importation of skills, seriously retard our overall development agenda. Contextually, one feels that the issue of the region’s CXC Math ‘challenge’ must become the subject of some kind of regional concept paper prepared by ‘experts’ on the subject and presented at the next gathering of Heads of Government of CARICOM in a manner designed to create a link between the region’s proficiency (or lack thereof) at Math and the extent to which the Caribbean’s broader developmental ambitions will be realized.
Ways must be found, it seems, to persuade regional political leaders, as a group, that if the extent of the Caribbean’s proficiency at Math remains where it appears to be at this time, then, from an overall developmental perspective, we are really on a hiding to nowhere. Bringing the issue much more to the fore across the region would, one expects, bring some kind of change to the extant situation in which it very much appears that our regional governments are nowhere near being fully sensitized to the gravity of this particular problem when compared with many of our various other developmental challenges.
Here it has to be said that while President Ali’s interest in a local probe into our CXC Math ‘headaches’ is well-merited, it would probably be all the more worthwhile to extend the initiative to the rest of the region (we can appreciate the President’s apparent position that charity begins at home) since what we are being told very much appears to suggest that the rest of CARICOM is pretty much ‘in the same boat.’
Insofar as we are aware, the unceasing ‘jaw-jawing’ about our CXC Mathematics travails has not been known to result in any serious studied attempt at a remedial strategy. It has to be said, here, that long before President Ali took office our CXC mathematics results had afforded us little if anything to ‘write home’ about. Accordingly, it would be wrong to hang all of the skeletons that are now scurrying out of the closet around the neck of the incumbent political administration, even though it is now better positioned than its predecessors to take meaningful remedial action. The ‘bottom line’ here is that Guyana’s (and the region’s) attempts to respond to the prevailing CXC Math challenge (crisis?) has always been weak and as a consequence, ineffective.
Some of the options, including what, in some instances, have been the challenging ‘extra lessons’ for CXC Math students, have not (on the basis of our recent CXC mathematics results) done much to alter the pattern of overall underperformance. Whether or not the region is equipped with all that it requires to (on its own) ‘turn around’ the CXC math crisis is an altogether different matter. Truth be told, it has not been established that the magnitude of the math challenge is attended to by the presence of a suitable cadre of experts here in the region, who can, on their own, first, clearly identify the particular nature of the challenge (s) and afterwards, move assuredly to tackle that challenge.
At a regional level it may yet require political decisions to get the ball rolling after which the real remedial work must be placed in the hands of the bona fide experts, from within the region and beyond, where this becomes necessary. Unless these initiatives are taken Guyana and the rest of the region will, down the road, come increasingly to recognize that their developmental ambitions are at variance with the local/regional (Math) skills necessary for the realization of those ambitions.
There is, as well, the need for the President to deliver a clear, unmistakable message to the Minister and Ministry of Education regarding the urgency of a probe into our CXC Math challenges that it is sufficiently thorough to become part of a wider regional search for solutions. Here, it is a matter of developing a time-bound remedial strategy with some measure of consultations with sister CARICOM countries and with some measure of extra regional expertise for tackling the problem. What should emerge here is a conceptual remedial plan for the attention of CARICOM Heads. One expects that these deliberations will be intra-regional in nature and that the outcomes will be available for CARICOM Heads, ideally, prior to them sitting down at the next regional summit.
One challenge that arises here is that, truth be told, the Ministry of Education has demonstrated a great deal of dilatoriness in its problem-solving pursuits (even outside the realm of the CXC issue) so that the Minister of Education and the various ‘specialists’ who will be responsible for, hopefully, salvaging the extant CXC results situation, will be clear in their minds that there will be strict timelines to their assignment. It should be added that there ought to be no haggling over whether or not we should ‘fly in’ specialists who are particularly qualified in those skills associated with the teaching of Math. Here (and the Ministry’s Math Specialists ought to be aware of this) any remedial action ought to embrace, among other things, training for our teachers in among other things, delivery methodologies. This approach should take into account the overwhelming students’ complaints about not being able to properly process what is being taught to them.
At this juncture, the President’s call for our Math students to ‘up their game next time around’, is not just a boisterous noise to the country as a whole, but, as well, a specific message to his Minister of Education that it is in the ‘engine room’ of the Ministry, and by extension, the classrooms of our nation that the battle for betterment has to begin.
