MY father recently pointed out an interesting suggestion from Ruel Reid, principal of Jamaica College, that was sure to result in debate. Healthy debate is always a good thing because it helps to identify the real problems, facilitates discussion of ideas based on merit and not emotion, then hopefully leads to a clear course of action supported by those who most need to support it.

The proposal was that “traditional” high schools would take over the running of nearby “non-traditional” high schools, rebrand them, bring “best practices” and this new campus would produce better performance.

Any proposed solution must have a problem to solve and be categorised short, medium and long term. While one can identify many problems, they must also be given priority levels and the Reid-proposed solutions indicate the problems on which he places the highest priority: lack of “best practices” in non-traditional high schools and a branding/image problem that makes them less attractive to parents and students.

Every Jamaican can agree that non-traditional high schools have a brand/image problem. However, my parents — a medical doctor and a nurse — taught me that you do not treat symptoms, you treat causes. Poor academic performance is a symptom, but what is the cause? Do traditional high schools really have better teachers and “best practices”, or is it something else?

My wife loves to cook and she likes to start with the best ingredients she can find to get the best-tasting meal. Education is no different — inputs matter. I attended Campion College, and it was clear that basically all the students were top performers, so it should be no surprise when Campion has great CXC results. It follows then that the lower performers at GSAT were placed elsewhere and most likely together.

Not only were they placed in other schools, they were placed in schools with fewer resources, immediately putting them at an additional disadvantage. The problems are then amplified by the fact that they are all mainly low performers. If you get 50 per cent on an exam and the highest in the class was 60 per cent, it follows that you won’t aim very high. If, however, your 50 per cent is at the bottom of the class, you have more incentive to pull up your socks.

Nadine Molloy, principal of Buff Bay High in Portland, said that “if we were to get the top-performing students and additional resources, we would get the same results as the traditional high schools”. This is a hypothesis that has never been tested to my knowledge. I am inclined to agree with her, but the scientist in me would like to see it tested.

Giving people “basket fi carry wata” and then criticising them for underperformance is a favourite Jamaican pastime and it must stop if we are going to make real progress.

We also need to face the reality about “better than” because everywhere in life there are comparisons, and individuals use their own judgements and measurements to determine what is better than something else. The USA is better than Jamaica in some ways and Jamaica is better than the USA in others, depending on what things are important to you.

Cynthia Cooke, the outgoing principal of Camperdown and someone I greatly respect, said that we should get rid of the “stigma” that some schools are better than others, but I believe that’s an impossible task as people will always judge. The public school system in the USA mainly places students according to where they live in the school district and people still talk about which school is better.

Ruel Reid is quite right when he says that “what we need is for all of our schools to offer quality education”, and the way to do that is to provide the schools with the proper resources. My logic follows as thus: If schools had proper resources, then they would have better performance results, better performance results mean better image and more willingness to attend certain schools (the US system clearly has the same issues when they institute voucher programmes and see students flee to private schools and charter schools).

Short-term Solutions

Cynthia Cooke did propose one of the best solutions I have seen to date — making sure that 20 per cent of the incoming student population of all high schools are randomly chosen low performers.

This can be implemented in the medium term and should be seriously looked at. I do not believe this is practical in the short term because this would mean that 20 per cent of the top performers would be displaced and a plan would have to be in place to deal with those students.

If all the schools were brought up to minimum acceptable standards and parents were confident that even if a school was not their first or second choice it would still be a quality learning institution, then there would be fewer complaints, but that takes time.

The current administration is investing in the right areas, early childhood and primary education, so that instead of having such massive gaps between performance we improve the quality of students moving on to the secondary level. If a “low-performing student” going into a non-traditional high school can move from averaging below 50 per cent to averaging below 70 per cent, then the stigma of certain schools will eventually be removed.

We cannot help but keep coming back to resources as the central problem. Reid possibly believes that rebranding Papine High as a campus of JC would not only help with the image but also open up new resources because JC alumni money could provide additional resources. This is probably true, but there are also other ways to achieve the same result without converting Papine High into an arm of a traditional high school.

School pairing, alumni and endowment funds

I have seen many examples of two cities becoming “sister cities” and adopting each other. If traditional high schools were to adopt non-traditional high schools in the area by providing technical assistance and encouraging alumni to donate to the adopted school, then similar progress could be made while allowing independence to remain. Schools could also seek to partner with schools overseas.

Saffron Jackson, a Jamaican-born teacher in the UK who served with me on the Jamaican Diaspora Advisory Board as the Future Leaders Representative for the UK, is working with a number of teachers right now to conduct two workshops for teachers in Jamaica later this year. Imagine if we engage individuals like this to not just put on workshops but get schools to adopt local schools and do regular workshops? Technology is such that we could easily facilitate regular communication via the Internet, a school mentoring programme if you will.

Other sources of money

Another source of money is alumni, but not the alumni most schools think of. My high school is currently raising a large amount of money but I decided not to donate much because Campion College does not need my money as much as some other schools. I support Molloy’s call for affluent past students of traditional high schools to contribute to schools APART from their alma mater.

The private sector have shown their support for non-traditional high schools, most notably when Jamaica National Building Society and Victoria Mutual Building Society, through the Mutual Building Societies Foundation, launched a J$100-million five-year initiative in February 2008 that would provide assistance to “at least 15 non-traditional high schools”.

The alumni associations I see active in the USA for a wide range of non-traditional Jamaican schools make it clear that resources are out there and with a little guidance, endowment funds for each school could be set up. Instead of running down money every year, schools need to follow universities in the UK and USA by setting up an endowment fund, raising money, investing it and then using the interest earned each year to help.

A Diaspora Education Bond was proposed at a previous Jamaican Diaspora Conference and Prime Minister Golding updated the nation on it when answering my question during his Jamaica House Live programme in July.

Any outsider looking in must be wondering how Jamaica could have such a major resource problem and yet we eliminated tuition fees and now have our hands tied by the IMF programme. Giving everyone access to poor education does not seem so wise. It would have been better to have a means test where those who can pay should pay and the money would go towards improving the lower performing schools right away.

Our priorities must be all wrong if education is a lower priority than politically connected individuals.

Even sadder is the fact that I have purposely left out one of the biggest factors that affect education and performance of students: the parents.

In 2008, Ena Barclay, the then president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, said that non-traditional high schools did not get enough support from parents and I suspect that this is easily proven if one were to seriously look at PTA activity, parent consultations with teachers and even the attitude towards education in the household. Upgraded schools, additional resources, fair wages for teachers, better image and mixing low performers and high performers will only do so much.

Parenting is the single biggest problem in Jamaica, and until we have a plan to deal with that, we are handicapped from the start. The Government cannot and should not solve everything.

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