R Howard Thompson

The decision by the minister of education to place students who recently sat the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) primarily according to where they live is a decision that has been long overdue. I consider it to be the most important decision on secondary education since Edwin Allen declared that 60 (or was it 70) per cent of students placed in high schools should come from the primary schools. I only hope that he has the backbone to resist the pressure from those parents who believe that their children must go to some ‘Bling Bling’ academy.

The decision by the minister of education to place students who recently sat the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) primarily according to where they live is a decision that has been long overdue. I consider it to be the most important decision on secondary education since Edwin Allen declared that 60 (or was it 70) per cent of students placed in high schools should come from the primary schools. I only hope that he has the backbone to resist the pressure from those parents who believe that their children must go to some ‘Bling Bling’ academy.

This decision, by itself, is a not panacea for the problems we face in education, but this last one in particular is absolutely necessary to allow us to do what is needed if we want to improve outcomes across the board and not just at particular schools. Having students live nearby will allow schools to keep them on campus for longer periods doing collaborative study as a substitute for the support system which many of them do not have at home. It will also make it easier for guidance counsellors to visit homes when required and for parents to visit the schools. In fact, within the next five years parental visits at schools should be made mandatory.

One thing that could be done now is to encourage schools to stagger the duties of teachers throughout the school day. At present, in some schools, teachers have to arrive at school before 8:00 am, even when they have no class until 11:00 am. Why not allow them to arrive in time for class on condition that they remain on duty at school until %:00 pm or 6:00 pm. This sort of thing has been done at boarding schools for years, where teachers who remain on prep duty until 10:00 or so at night are given a morning or afternoon off.

This move by the minister should also be used to get rid of the practice of recruiting athletes to enhance sports teams. Athletes should run for the schools in their communities, as Usain Bolt did in Trelawny, and footballers and cricketers should represent their schools and communities. It will also allow us to see that siblings who live in the same home are placed at the same school so that parents do not have to ask for two or three extra days from work for parents’ day visits.

Most importantly, however, is that it will connect schools in a meaningful way to specific communities to whom they can be made accountable. When this has been implemented for a five- to 10-year period, schools can then be held more accountable for the outcomes as represented in external examinations. For, at that point, even if failure is due to lack of support systems at home, schools would then be in a better position to do something about it.

At present, teachers at Christiana High School are being held accountable for the performance of students sent there from Mandeville because they were not good enough to be accepted at schools in Mandeville. I have never been able to understand the logic of making it more difficult for a student to get an education because the student is weak. The question that we must begin to ask, is not why these students were not good enough to attend the schools in Mandeville, but rather why the schools in Mandeville are not good enough to teach those students.

As I have said before, we should not continue to develop our educational system on the assumption that our students come from stable nuclear families, that were the norm for the middle classes in the 1950s. Our children today are being supervised by remote control by parents who have to travel great distances, even abroad, to acquire the subsistence required to keep them alive and send them to school. Schools will have to take on more of the responsibility of nurturing our children and both work and school has to be made more family-friendly.

howardthompson507@yahoo.com

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