In a previous article, I have drawn to attention the disturbing state of early childhood education in Jamaica, largely relegated to "community" basic schools which are unlicensed and usually unregulated private schools run for profit on someone's verandah, presided over by "Miss Matilda" who, in most cases, is herself barely literate, too authoritarian and unskilled in stimulating the imagination of her young charges.

This early damage to the psyche of our infants, coupled with the deprivations of their home life, corrupts the remaining stages of the education cycle and defeats most attempts to improve the end product.

In truth, Jamaica's overall education system is so complicated and compromised that rational analysis is extremely difficult.

There are organisational systems which can be improved over time by gradual adjustments but some systems are so out of joint that only a complete revamping will ensure success. Our present system is one such.

What is needed is a bold, new vision and the political will to treat teachers as true professionals, to reward them as such and then to demand the highest standards of professional performance from them.

NO UNIFORM STANDARDS

Under the present system there are no uniform standards for training persons interested in becoming teachers.

Such persons can randomly trickle into the system in a number of categories as follows:

Pre-trained teachers: Secondary school graduates with four CXC passes at Grades I, II or even III who can teach at the basic, primary and even secondary levels.

Trained teachers: Secondary school graduates with as few as four CXC passes who have earned a diploma after three years of training at one of six teacher training colleges. Such persons can teach throughout the system.

Pre-trained graduate teachers: University graduates, local or foreign, who have gained a B.A. or B.Sc. degree. Such persons can teach at any level in the system, although they have received no training as teachers per se.

Trained graduate teachers: Persons with undergraduate degrees supplemented by a diploma in education, and persons with a teachers college diploma plus a university degree.

This fragmented approach is compounded by the fact that teachers from any of the above categories are not assigned by a central authority to a specific school so as to achieve a balance of expertise and geographic distribution of skills but rather, each teacher goes out job-hunting on his or her own and is employed by individual school boards.

How much do teachers really earn? In the on-going contretemps over teachers pay, fairness of the level being discussed is often obfuscated by salaries being quoted "after tax" and ignoring so called "allowances" which are really part of the salary package.

Since every citizen is obliged to pay income tax, commentators and teachers themselves should speak always of gross salary per annum, including allowances, most of which are taxable in any case. This is the accepted practice in the private sector and, if adopted, would facilitate true comparisons.

In each category, there is a starting and ending salary scale and I estimate the median pay as shown in the chart below.

For purposes of this article I will use $350,000 per annum as average current teachers remuneration.

How does the present system stack up in the calibre of teachers who teach our teachers?

There are 302 teachers college lecturers, 107 of whom have post-graduate degrees (Masters or Ph.Ds), 176 have first degrees at university level and 19 have specialist diplomas.

Only about a third of the lecturers at teachers colleges are at a satisfactory professional level.

DISEQUILIBRIUM AT THE PRIMARY LEVEL

Raising the qualifications of lecturers at teachers colleges would certainly contribute to improving the overall educational system especially if, at the same time, the entrance requirements for students entering teachers colleges are raised from the present four CXCs to five CXCs of which those in English must not be lower than Grade II (now Grade III).

Disequilibrium is evident at the primary level. There are currently about 182,566 students in what may be referred to as true primary schools receiving an education in grades one through six, that is from ages six to 11.

But there are also 71, 208 students in all-age primary schools, grades one to six, who are grouped in the same school building as grades seven to nine, sharing the same teachers.

Then there is yet another category designated "primary and junior high schools" with a population of 56,034 students. Total primary school population is, therefore, about 309,808.

It is difficult, indeed well nigh impossible, to get statistics to show how the primary school population flows into each category of the secondary school system.

Suffice it to say that all children at grade six are given a Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT). Those who score the highest are assigned to the best secondary schools, the rest to what I am tempted to call "faux" secondary schools i.e. so-called comprehensive high schools, all-age schools and primary and junior high schools - inferior institutions baptised by politicians as scondary schools.

Despite attempts under the Reform of Secondary Education (ROSE) programme to standardise a common curriculum for grades seven through nine, there remains a gulf between the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) results achieved in traditional secondary schools and those achieved in the "faux" secondary schools.

Most graduates of the senior secondary schools (22 per cent of the total secondary school population) score well on the CXC exams, many students getting eight subjects at Grades I and II, some gaining scholarships to universities abroad.

With some exceptions, graduates of the other non-traditional secondary schools score poorly on the CXC examination, yet are accommodated at the tertiary level.

The overall CXC pass rate of 31 per cent for mathematics and 58 per cent for English this year masks the fact that in the non-traditional secondary schools the pass rate was only 14 per cent for mathematics and 39 per cent for English - an objective indictment of education at the secondary level in Jamaica, a stigma which no amount of rationalisation can remove from the national conscience.

We continue to labour under the false belief, consciously or unconsciously, that Jamaicans have a "right" to tertiary education, a popular shibboleth without any philosophic foundation of what a "right" really means.

Not even the liberal list of new "rights" created by the United Nations after World War II goes this far.

Subsidised tertiary education is only a sub-set of the general dependency syndrome which has debilitated the nation over time.

There is undoubtedly a role for tertiary institutions in Jamaica (technical as well as universities), but, as the overall educational system comes under increasing pressure for funding, it is time to put ideology aside and debate pragmatically where best we should allocate our dwindling resources.

In making allocations, politicians are tempted to assign a little here and a little there in order to keep everybody happy but such a popularist approach usually ends up weakening the entire structure so that ultimately nobody really benefits and everybody becomes a victim of the emergency.

In the last budget some $19 billion or about 10.5 per cent of the Recurrent National Expenditure Budget (including debt servicing) was allocated to education.

Although the powers that be pay lip service to Early Childhood education, it ranked disastrously low at 4.5 per cent of the overall allocation compared with 18.3 per cent to tertiary education at the other end of the scale. The current "economic" cost of an education at the University of the West Indies on a "merged" faculty basis is about $510,000 per student and with students on average paying only 15 per cent of the "economic" cost of their education, subsidising tertiary education in Jamaica costs Government, (read "tax-payer") about $2.4 billion a year, while almost the entire costs of early childhood education is borne by private citizens at the lower end of the economic scale. This cannot be just. If the amount of subsidy for tertiary education was reduced to 50 per cent of economic cost, this would save some $900 million which could go immediately to a reformed early childhood education system.

Next week: Solving the teacher problem