Martin HenryTHE IMPASSE between the Ministry of Educa-tion and teachers over redundancies has been allowed to sideline a number of other important developments in education.
The most important stakeholders, students and parents, are left out of the loop, mere bystanders in the battle royal between Ministry/Minister and the JTA. And the Minister is too slowly recognising that he has serious obligations to carefully explain his actions to these stakeholders and to the wider public in the larger context of educational reform for system improvement.
I have been itching to marshall a public communication campaign on behalf of education reform. Some of the most far-reaching changes in the system since Internal Self-Government in 1944 are under way now.
The battle-shy, self-effacing Minister, Burchell Whiteman, is doing things which put him in the league of Florizel Glasspole and Edwin Allen among Education Ministers. But you would never know.
What is sorely needed, and I have told the Minister, is the strategic manoeuvre of organising the numerically superior stakeholders of parents, students, employers and public to understand the system and to demand more of it. A supply of public information and an Education Charter are the mechanisms. The Green Paper on Education has promised much along these lines. It's time to get cracking. But the implications for the Ministry itself, for schools and for teachers to be brought under closer public scrutiny and greater user demand are likely to derail the process if it is not guided by a firm hand.
One of the matters which has been pushed off the agenda of public concern by the teachers/Ministry impasse is the progress of the Reform of Secondary Education (ROSE) Project. Last week Wednesday (February 7) the Ministry and the World Bank which financed the project held an end of project workshop at the Jamaica Conference Centre.
The ROSE Project has been running since 1993 and has its roots in the 1983 UNESCO review of secondary education. My own engagement with ROSE goes back a long way to working on the Science and the Careers curricula and doing editing on the Science texts.
The over-arching objective of the project was to provide a common curriculum for Grades 7-9 across the educational system around the central themes of Access, Quality and Equity. As I have had occasion to write previously, access, quality and equity together are unachievable. But the quest for utopia has yielded some positive results.
The reform has not just been about curriculum but has encompassed infrastructure, human resources and support services. Textbooks have been developed, teachers trained and schools improved. The public knows little about all of this. It is amazing how little has been communicated while the country spent billions of dollars of World Bank money with the obligations resting on taxpayers.
The loan and grant financing of education raises serious questions: What would the system do without external funding? How long can we continue this way? And, to rephrase Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies' justified question which got him into deep hot water, if the investment in education which is saddling us with debt does not raise our productive capacity and generate economic growth, how can it be justified?
The World Bank seems quite pleased with the ROSE Project and is set to finance ROSE II. An awake and critical Parliament and public should be enquiring "for what? And what did ROSE I get us?"
The Evaluation Unit with which I worked at the end of project workshop says it has tons of evaluative data on the project. Some positive tidbits which surfaced in various intervention include:
The number of ROSE schools exceeded projections
All-Age schools were brought into the project
The Grade 7-9 ROSE curriculum has become well articulated with the Primary curriculum below and the CXC curriculum above.
Several schools, including Dallas Primary and Junior High and McGrath upgrade High (present at the workshop as "exhibits"), have done remarkably well with the project
The performance gap in the Grade Nine Junior High School Certificate Examination between All-Age Schools at one end and Traditional High Schools at the other end is steadily closing.
The evaluation component of the project has considerably strengthened the capacity of the Ministry to monitor secondary education.
High quality textbooks have been developed by teams of local writers to support the project.
There is some indication that the inching up of CXC performance (which the Minister is always boasting about) has something to do with ROSE preparation at Grades 7-9 paying off in Grades 10 and 11.
I have been promised more "bragging data".
Intangibles
But all is not well. The problems of access, quality and equity, though dented somewhat, are still seriously around. One of the key points which came up in the deliberations was that school performance could not be determined only by tangible resources inputs.
The evaluation people want to probe these intangibles in centres of excellence like Dallas and McGrath.
In hushed, off-the-record tones the biggest problem rose again and again, a problem of which the public does not seem to be fully aware: thousands of students at the end of Grade Nine in the All Age Schools and Junior High Schools are not getting places in a Grade 10 programme anywhere and are too young for HEART which recruits at 17. In a perverse twist, the positive upgrading of New Secondary Schools to High Schools, which are fed students from the GSAT and from the top of the Junior High School Certificate Exam, has had the negative effect of restricting automatic transfers leaving thousands of 15-year-olds out of school. The Ministry and Minister seem to be ducking the issue. It is a major problem.
Another problem that I am aware of from other sources is the unpreparedness of the system to adequately deliver the integrated, multi-disciplinary Resource and Technology core component.
Teachers are not trained that way; they are trained in single technical/vocational disciplines and the enforced team teaching is not working well. Then also there is the chronic shortage of adequately trained teachers for the Science component.
ROSE II will have to address these and other issues and the really big one of how much non-access, low-quality and inequity the reformed system is prepared to tolerate on a base of scarce (and shrinking) resources. Nowhere in the world has the impossible yet been achieved of equality in access and quality for equity. Even with an explosion of resources equalised across the system there is that nagging little question of why schools like Dallas and McGrath are better than the others down the road.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
