Peter Espeut
I AM SURPRISED at how few people know that there is no pass mark for the GSAT. The number who 'pass' depends upon the number of spaces in the receiving high schools.
Some years ago (before GSAT) I visited a friend who was a senior official in the Ministry of Education, and I found him sitting at his desk in a quandary, with a ruler in his hand. In front of him were parish lists of examination results segregated by gender, and his was the task to draw a line on each list. Those above the line would 'pass'.
There is no objective standard of performance which will guarantee a student a place in high school. With the same grade, in one year a student could get a place in high school (when on average most others did poorly), and in another year (when on average most others did well) not!
There is a serious disconnect between the number of Grade 6 places in primary and all-age schools and the number of Grade 7 places in traditional and comprehensive high schools. In 1993, there were 48,742 Grade 6 places and only 18,482 Grade 7 places - less than half! The other 20,000-plus students will either remain in their all-age school and go to Grade 7, or go to Grade 7 in a new secondary school.
The GSAT is the mechanism to allocate these scarce benefits and spoils. Those students with the highest grades get their first choice of high school, and so a sort of ghettoisation results: the best students pack up certain schools, and those who are borderline end up at other schools.
Inevitably the high schools are ranked by the public; new secondary schools are ranked even below the lowest high school.
In the past, the overall quality of Grade 6 students was so low that after allocating a few thousand, the remainder were mostly illiterate, and became a burden to whichever high school they were sent to.
CREATING NEW HIGH SCHOOLS
You can imagine the low quality of those who did not even get a high school place. It has never been the intention or the policy by successive PNP and JLP governments that all young Jamaicans should have a place in high school.
Obviously, the solution to the problem was to build more high schools or upgrade 'new secon-dary' schools to create more quality high school places so more Jamaicans could 'pass' the GSAT.
What has been done is to rebaptise 'new secondary schools' into 'high schools' to create more places. Holy Trinity Junior Secondary School became Holy Trinity Secondary School, and then Holy Trinity Comprehensive High School, and then Holy Trinity High School without so much as a science lab, language lab, or computer lab.
I know, because I was school board member and then board chairman during many of these rebaptisms. Holy Trinity receives students from the GSAT, mostly underachievers, to put it politely.
NOT ENOUGH PLACES
Story come to bump! For whatever reason, the number of high achievers - high GSAT scorers - has made a dramatic improvement; in fact, the number with PERFECT SCORES (100 per cent) in the GSAT is so great that they cannot even decide who to award the national scholarships.
And now, they cannot find enough places in traditional high schools for the high-scoring GSAT stars! Only low achiever places are available! Story come to bump!
But then story has been coming to bump for years. In this column over the last 15 years I have called for an end to apartheid in education in Jamaica, where public funds are spent to create both high class high schools and low class secondary schools. We must stop preparing our young people to be fit only for unskilled manual labour in the cane, banana and coffee pieces of Jamaica!
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
