TRANSFORMATION is revolution. With all the mindless, disgusting excrescences around, some good things are happening. Education transformation (ET) is the best kept secret – it needs a shout-out.

Prime Minister Patterson initiated it with $5b and the process is still under way. The JLP and PNP talk and confuse people, but there is more continuity in education than you think. ET is bigger than minister, but minister can help, hinder or bring dazzling dimensions to it. No one will upset big foreign money funders. I read all about ET from the UK.

Thwaites is like LBJ, the man who passed the laws which Kennedy had prepared, and created a sea change for black people. Implementing the laws is easy if teachers, parents, Ministry of Education staff are pliant, so kids will not suffer for a new decade. I would like to unpack ET in a few columns using material in the public domain. It is too important for us to remain ignorant.

My first shock back home was to find many people don’t know what it is, may do or where it’s at; yet it consumes billions of dollars of our taxes. ET is evolving and creativity can make it faster, stronger, better. ET is the greatest programme of mass uplift since emancipation. Who knows? Decadal as apprenticeship and as seminal to our nation. Blessed be Dr Rae Davies.

The concept was elaborated by consultants and it is not only new laws or bodies, it’s much more. ET moves more slowly than hoped as it takes years to pass a law unless the masses get angry with Parliament. Get angry! ET will make education responsive, accountable and nimble.

Sadly, the public know more about the month-old JEEP than the decade-old ET which will affect us for generations. Unbundling ET is not easy, for it is complex and moving as we speak. We had good schools long before we had an education system. The schools perform but the system underperforms despite entrepreneurs as Edwin Allen, Manley (literacy), DRB Grant (basic schools). ET is interdecadal, not a quick fix.

What you see now is confusing, the lees of the old as the new is emerging – cocoon, chrysalis, butterfly. Legacy schools produced brilliant individuals. But the purpose of a “system” is not to produce a few geniuses. The system is to produce uniform quality in the entire cohort, yet not inhibit a genius. A factory has a system so almost 100 per cent is made to spec.

Our agriculture has no system, hence poor quality, glut and scarcity. With a system you produce 90 per cent plus to quality specs, five per cent gourmet grade and the rest reject or rework. Any system which does not do this is failing. A few polymaths build our reputation but for prosperity we just need the educated 90 per cent. We need system. Masses who are merely literate cannot help us – they create problems.

In 1962 we inherited top schools and an education system. We expected progressively better mass education as the system allows us to replicate the best, identify what needs fixing, so next year the results will be better. Has education moved closer to perfection each year? To 100 per cent success? System is regularity and renewal – new curricula, exams, better teachers, top educators, top results; population grows so we have more schools, but do we have better results than pre-1962? For decades we have 90 per cent enrolment – parents sent their kids to school. Did school deliver for them? Send home 90 per cent or more well educated men and women to their families to take a job or make a job and fuel prosperity? Do the reality check!

ET is about quality. Barbados with similar history and people is wildly successful. Why not us? ET is root and branch; transforming structures, processes, people – this latter is hard. Some think we just need money. Yet Cabinets have been so generous – education is the largest ministry.

We do not get it. Were we like Greece, parents might have razed Heroes Circle. Chat with educators or lesser mortals across the island and you find a wordy vagueness about ET. How do you tell a PhD that you can’t explain ET by repeating the word “transformation” in the explanation? “Well, we are transforming education and transforming the ministry and transforming primary education which is most important.” Puleeaase!

Some think we should be grateful for the education we get. We pay for more! The work of good educators, teachers, administrators, parents is legendary, but the results belie their effort. Once I was welding a functional item, it went “abzocky” so I welded more metal on it and flogged it as art. Failed for function, profitable as art! Is our education art or functional?

ET means the education enterprise is to be morphed from what it is to a better state – “born again”. Observe all changes in education very closely – ministry, teachers, officers, buildings, etc. Did you know a big part of our national debt was for education? Yet most graduates are exported – some involuntary and we pay. You want reparation? This is a good place to start!

You can’t shut down education to do ET and have a grand opening later like a factory. Education is life. You can’t suspend, defer, postpone it. ET is like running repairs — you can’t close the plant ever (I would, and send everyone to plant food for three months and you would not notice it.) Some areas of ET move fast and many changes are in process simultaneously.

Think toilet (hope you are not eating) when you flush stuff you don’t want it to rush out while new water rushes in at the same time – transformation. Inspectors deployed; some see a professional assessment of their school – shock! A top scientist when I was last here now manages a global food firm. He morphed into a top manager – he talks and acts differently. Principals too will soon find out they are managers, not superpedagogues. ET is messy, convoluted and costly. Build a temporary bridge to get access for workmen; to build the real bridge is duplication, but not redundancy. ET has some of this too; it is necessary.

ET borrows from proven corporate practice. Firms as IBM were transformed decades ago. How do you change a monolithic entity into a nimble, effective one? You disaggregate, devolve authority and accountability; happy workers with great ideas, satisfied clients, good results, low costs; govern by targets, systems, standards, results – this is transformation!

ET is the most hopeful thing to happen to us since Independence. History beckons. To get a group or rich guys to build a small branded legacy school is pain. Wolmer and Munro did it for them; money but no vision; a beauty contest and they let off cash galore! Life is a bitch!

Renaissance! A decade gone and still not complete; Burchell, Maxine, Andrew – keepers of the flame — but crunch time is here as ET moves from paper to practice. The hard stuff is licensing teachers, creating a corporate office; can regional officers handle authority, be accountable, get results? We need rivalry. Which will be the top region? Serve its students best? ET is our only hope to revolutionise production, work, ethics and grow prosperity. It is not a pothole we fix and refix or a crop we consume and plant again; it is an asset that produces till death. We can’t be a place to “live, work, bring up children” and I would add “grow old gracefully and with contentment” without ET. Get involved. Stay conscious!

Dr Franklin Johnston is a strategy expert and project manager and the senior advisor to the minister of education.

franklinjohnstontoo@gmail.com