REPORTS OF the successful conclusion of the seven-year long New Horizon Project (NHP) in 72 primary schools provide a welcome change amid the many challenges in the education sector. The USAID-funded project was designed to improve student performance in reading and mathematics.
Data from the 2003 literacy test administered to grade four students showed only 57 per cent of these students achieving full mastery. The NHP has apparently delivered some dramatic improvements. The Polly Ground Primary School in St, Catherine, one of the pilot schools, moved from consistently low literacy levels to a 96 per cent pass rate in the literacy test last year, achieving the highest score in Ministry of Education's Region 6. Similar success stories have come from other participating schools, many of them operating under difficult circumstances with mostly poor children as students.
Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson has noted that mastery levels have moved, in some cases, from a low of 16 per cent to a high of 50 per cent. Fifty per cent may not look like much, until the fact of a three-fold increase is taken into account. In the wranglings between teachers and the Ministry of Education over performance appraisal of teachers, this point of measuring incremental value added against resource input has to be clearly made as the basis of fair assessment. No one is asking teachers to magically achieve passes for all their students. But their input and measurable learning output as incremental value-added can, and should, be used to appraise performance. The series of standardised tests developed under another externally funded project, the National Assessment Programme (NAP), provides a solid basis for measuring and comparing output.
The New Horizon Project was rather richly endowed. Not only did it include a breakfast feeding programme, but participating schools received technological support in the form of TVs, videos, overhead projectors, computers, and even digital cameras. It is hard to see how with the end of grant funding this outlay can be replicated in the other 733 primary schools. Nor do we believe that literacy education is of necessity a hi-tech matter. Many projects like the NHP have in the past shown serious decline or have even died outright when external funding support ceases.
Literacy and numeracy mastery by all Jamaican children is too important a matter to be left without the strongest support possible from the Government itself. Most of our CARICOM partners have achieved higher levels. The motto of the Ministry of Education is "Every child can learn; every child must". The lessons of the New Horizon Project must now be taken on board by the ministry for policy and financing. And the ministry's own performance must also be assessed.
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