FOLLOWING the success of its teacher training and school improvement programmes, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is greatly increasing its assistance to underperforming primary schools.

The new USAID programme will serve 250 of the worst performing schools at the primary level islandwide and “contribute to the achievement of increased early grade reading fluency and increased foundation math skills”, according to the agency.

It will also help to improve the capacity of the National Education Inspectorate and the Jamaica Teaching Council, to monitor school management and performance.

The project, which will cost US$90 million over the next five years, follows the Expanding Education Horizons (EEH) project, which targeted 71 of the lowest performing schools, raising 68 of them above the national average.

“We hope to see a significant improvement in the number of students passing the Grade Four Literacy Test,” mission director Dr Karen Hilliard said last Monday.

She was the special guest at the Observer’s weekly Monday Exchange forum.

Hilliard noted that last year, almost 23 per cent of students who took the grade four test achieved non-mastery.

“We want to see that figure go way down over the next four years,” she said.

The mission head pledged her support to aiding the Jamaican Government’s efforts to eradicate literacy among primary-level children. She said raising literacy levels across the country would reduce the importance of students being placed in particular schools as a result of the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT).

“We look forward to the day when they (students) don’t need a test like that,” Hilliard said.

Noting that Jamaica will need more secondary school places as performance at the primary level improves, she added that the commitment of larger donor agencies would be needed to engage in construction of these schools.

The USAID Caribbean Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training (CETT) reading project, sponsored by USAID, show that most students on the programme for three years, moved from being at risk of learning to read to being at or above their grade level in performance.

The USAID also sponsored the CETT reading project over seven years involving 22,000 primary students across eight Caribbean countries. This programme helped improve the performance of students who were reading below their grade level.