REITERATING its stance against performance-based pay, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) is urging the Government to introduce standardised lessons and internal testing at the secondary level, arguing that the performance of students is relative to standardisation.

Since student performance is largely hinged on internal assessment, the JTA is arguing that without a national standard, remunerating teachers according to their students’ output is unfair.

“Our system, as we see it right now, cannot support performance-based pay,” JTA President Nadine Molloy said last Thursday at the Observer Press Club.

“The standards are not in place to deal with that. The system is too uneven, and until we have the standards in place I don’t see how we can go after that.”

By “uneven”, Molloy meant the infrastructural and academic gaps between traditional and non-traditional schools as well as unequal standards of assessment among institutions.

Those gaps, coupled with domestic-related problems students face at school such as hunger, lack of sleep, and the effects of both physical and verbal abuse, Molloy said, consistently put some students at a disadvantage.

“There is an absence of standardised lesson plans across Jamaica, so it speaks to the fact that we don’t have standardised teaching and we don’t have standardised internal exams. ‘A’ in a traditional school is not ‘A’ in another school.

“We need to stop saying that teachers are using that as an excuse. It is conceivable that some teachers use that as an excuse… but the reality is, those other things need to be addressed even before we start to put money into the schools,” she said.

Further pushing the case for standardised testing, according to the JTA head, was the issue of exam subsidies offered by the Government. Last week, Education Minister Andrew Holness announced that as of next year exam fee subsidies will only be granted to students who have attained a certain grade leading up to the external exam. Currently, all students sitting Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate (CSEC) Mathematics, English, Information Technology and one science subject, and any two at the advanced level, enjoy the subsidy. But citing a 40 per cent failure rate and losses related to failure to sit the exams, Holness said going forward, only students with a certain grade will be able to access the subsidy.

But the JTA is wary.

“What about the student who does well in fourth form but doesn’t pass in fifth form? Or the one who doesn’t do well in fourth but picks up and passes the (external) exam?” Molloy asked, adding, “The issue of subsidies brings into sharp focus the need for standardised tests.”

“We do not support the wastage, but we really want to examine all the issues because we want the children to benefit from the subsidy, especially those who can’t afford it,” she said.

The JTA head, who is also principal of Buff Bay High School, said her constituents have been calling for standardised lesson plans for “some time now” and suggested that educators could explore the business of producing standardised tests.

Despite the JTA’s argument against performance-based pay, Molloy said she was not against improved performance but cautioned that the success of the measure in other states didn’t make it automatically suited to the Jamaican situation.

“At no time is the JTA against improved performance. As a matter of fact, this year you are going to hear more from me calling for it strongly, but at this time I cannot support performance-based pay,” she said.

“We can’t just get up and arrive at a decision because we have read a document that says performance-based pay is supposed to achieve ‘X’… We have to look at the situation in Jamaica and the technicalities of it.”