THE EDUCATION Minister, Mrs. Maxine Henry-Wilson, has told the public, from the platform of Parliament, that cheating was not a factor in the delay in publication of the placement of students after the GSAT exam. In other words, this year's Grade Six Achievement Test was not compromised.
We are inclined to believe Mrs Henry-Wilson, normally a thoughtful politician and public servant focused on making Jamaica a better place for all of us to live.
Two issues, however, arise from the minister's parliamentary statement, one of which appears to raise serious ethical questions about how public officials communicate with the people they serve, and ought to provide lessons to Mrs Henry-Wilson. The other is related to the first, but calls into question the bases on which policy is formulated, and may help to explain why so many development projects either go wrong or do not deliver the expected benefits.
On the first point, it appears, to put it bluntly, that the Education Ministry lied to the public early on the GSAT imbroglio, and in the end tied itself into knots. For that, Mrs. Henry-Wilson cannot escape responsibility and should have acknowledged as much in her statement on Tuesday.
According to the minister's explanation to the House, by May 18, it had become clear to the Ministry of Education that there was a shortage of 3,800 secondary school places in St. Catherine and Clarendon to place all the children who wrote the GSAT exam. But this was not acknowledged when the ministry communicated with the public the following day.
Instead, the ministry told Jamaicans that it would deliver the results to schools electronically, providing more data which they could analyse and plan interventions. As a result, Jamaicans were told, the GSAT results were likely to be out later than projected. This explanation was, at best, only partially true. For the ministry knew of the problems in its Region 6 and was scrambling to find a solution to the shortage of places.
If Mrs. Henry-Wilson and her team had been truthful from the start, the angst and suspicion of recent weeks might have been avoided. The failure displays an arrogant disrespect for people, too often displayed by public officials who assume themselves to be the font of wisdom overseeing constituents who need to be handled with childish benevolence.
The other point seems, on the face of it, to give credence to an argument often made by the Opposition politician, Mr. Mike Henry: that policy in Jamaica is often made with inadequate data. In Region 6, according to the minister, high school places have not kept pace with demand for it is one of those places where "the population keeps shifting". These numbers, though, seem very high and suggest that the authorities have not done enough work to map the demographics of the area. Or that the work was not well done.
Either way, the result is flawed policy and, therefore, flawed planning. The upshot: a shortage of school places - and other things.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
