THE schools in Manchester and St Elizabeth – which make up the education ministry’s Region 5 – are, as a group, the best performers among high schools, according to an analysis of Jamaica’s results in the CXC’s secondary school’s exams by education researcher Dr Dennis Minott.

But not withstanding the performance of these two parishes in comparison to other administrative education districts, analysts stress that their education outputs were still below what should be the norm.

Minott called for a major overhaul of the regional offices to make them more accountable and effective, accusing regional education officers and school administrators of “buck passing” on their failure to perform.

The Minott report, elements of which have been unveiled in the Sunday Observer, has given renewed impetus to the debate on the state of education in Jamaica.

This focus on regional performance will likely put pressure on the education minister, Maxine Henry Wilson, to bring new urgency to reviewing the system of regionalisation as part of a major overhaul of the education system.

“The analyses won’t make good reading for education administrators,” a senior official conceded last night.

“It confirms what we already know. There are pockets of good performances and education outcomes, but overall things are very dismal. It makes the reform programme all the more urgent.”

In fact, Region 5 whose Mandeville-based director is Reuben Grey, is only one of two regions which performed above par for Jamaican schools in the CXC exams over the period 2001-2004.

At 5.36 percentage points ahead of the par score, Region 5, was ahead of the Kingston region, which covers schools in the capital and the associated St Andrew parish and parts of western St Thomas.

The Mandeville and Kingston-based regions apart, the other four all performed below par, with the Port Antonio-based Region 2 – covering schools in Portland, St Mary and St Thomas – being the worst, delivering at 12.52 percentage points below the minimum level.

The Port Antonio office is headed by Beryl Jengelly.

The situation is equally as dismal when the performance of Jamaican schools is further broken down by parishes. Only in five – Trelawny (the top performer), St James, St Andrew, St Elizabeth and Manchester – of the 14 parishes were schools deemed by the Minott study to have performed above par.

Of the others, Hanover and St Thomas, each more than 25 percentage points below the par score, and Westmoreland, nearly 22 percentage points below the range, performed worst.

In this study, jointly sponsored by the Observer and Minott’s A-QUEST organisation, the researchers analysed nearly 800,000 records of Jamaican students who sat the CXC’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, as well as another 200,000 bits of data from the education ministry.

They used mathematical deflators to equalise the relationship between those schools that are far more accommodating in allowing students regardless, preparing them to sit as many subjects as possible in the CXCs, and those that screen and cull, often with the aim of ensuring a high percentage of passes.

In ranking the performance of high schools, the Minott team applied the scores achieved by students in each subject group, found the mean average of the sum of these scores to gain a crude fifth form-score.

They then adjusted the crude scores by applying the deflator, which takes into account both the average number of subjects sat by students – assuming that five is the minimum to allow students to either pursue higher education or to enter the job market – and the proportion of students retained by schools between third and fifth forms (the retention ratio).

Similarly, Minott and his researchers established the par score for both parish and school regions – the mean of the adjusted fifth form scores for parish and regions for 2001-2004 – and compared them to the par score for the island as a whole.

These adjusted scores are roughly equivalent to grade point averages (GPA).

At the national level, the adjusted fifth form score was 1.2195, approximately 40 per cent below what would be expected to be an average GPA of 2.0, or a “C” in a letter grade.

Based on what would be expected to be the performance norm, even Jamaica’s best performing regions and parishes, the data suggests, have substantial catching up to do.

But even at this, the disparities between regions and parishes “are stark,” Minott noted.

In the case of the parishes, schools in Trelawny performed at 34 per cent above par, nearly a third better than St James and twice as good as the third best performer, St Elizabeth.

“Regional directorates, boards of governors and school administrators need to account to the (education ministry), the nation, its students, parents and taxpayers for this state of affairs,” the Minott report says.

In a specific recommendation, it said: “Because there is a fair degree of ‘buck passing’ between education officers in the (ministry’s) regional offices, on the one hand, and the administrators of high schools in the respective regions, on the other, it is critical that the overlapping lines of responsibility be removed.

After early consultations, it might be least disruptive to retask and restructure the regional offices to perform more effectively with respect to high school outcomes, while the planned education reforms are gestating.”