The entrenchment of apartheid in education
I unequivocally support the notion of free secondary education. In fact, I would love for Jamaica to be able to provide free education at ALL levels.
The Charter of Rights, which was entrenched in the Constitution in 2011, confers the right of every child to publicly funded tuition in a public education institution at the pre-primary and primary levels. I support that. However, while I voted for that amendment, I think it should have included the secondary level. But it took them decades to get agreement on that Charter, so I said ‘Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all’.
The Government of Jamaica is today in breach of that right conferred in the Constitution as we have never provided access to publicly funded tuition to every child at the pre-primary level. It is a justiciable right and no parent in Jamaica should be paying tuition at those levels – if so, they can take the Government to court, armed with the Charter of Rights, and win.
There are three categories of pre-primary schools – basic schools (basically started by people in the community or by a church, many times with a bright young lady who finished at fifth form as the teacher), which are bottom of the scale; infant schools, which are usually attached to a primary school and completely government managed; and kindergarten, which are completely private.
Under Maxine Henry-Wilson, with the Education Transformation Plan, the Government started paying one teacher per basic school, and provided some amount of training. The programme was negatively affected after 2007 when the education system’s funding was misaligned due to the Jamaica Labour Party’s effort to fund their 2007 free tuition promise, not dissimilar to the erosion of the health system’s infrastructure due to the premature implementation of the no-user-fee policy in health (that’s when schools simply increased the auxiliary fees to make up for the underfunding).
The cleavage in our education system starts manifesting itself from the pre-primary level. When the grade one diagnostic profile is conducted, it shows that a significantly higher percentage of students who attended basic schools are not ready for the grade one curriculum. That cleavage persists throughout the education system in general.
Out of that recognition came the slogan ‘Start them right, make them bright!’ It was both to satisfy the constitutional right and the knowledge that you have to fix pre-primary education in order to fix our education system why Ronnie Thwaites focused significantly on pre-primary education. That’s why so many pre-primary teachers were trained and so many basic schools built, because the existing schools were poorly located and up to 2011, less than 15 per cent of teachers on our pre-primary systems were trained to teach the pre-primary curriculum.
So you had round pegs in square holes. Essentially, those who could afford to send their kids to kindergarten were starting off their kids with a significant advantage in life. The foundations of democratic socialism are social justice and equality – the foundation of all our beliefs is our belief in equality.
The system described above is apartheid, not equality. It maintains two Jamaicas by policy design, hopefully inadvertently and not deliberately, and is not an opportunity to escape poverty through quality education. I am sure that if we did a tracer study it would show that the majority of the 20 per cent of our students who drop out of school by fourth form, or the 80 per cent who do not matriculate for tertiary studies were disadvantaged from the pre-primary level.
Further, children who attend school on the shift system lose one hour of teaching per day, five hours per week, 20 hours per month, 60 hours per term and 180 hours per school year. Would you want that for your child? How many of the top-performing schools are on the shift system? NONE. And children of the rich rarely, if ever, attend a shift school. That is why a policy of the previous Administration was to build classrooms and schools. Last year alone, Ronnie Thwaites removed over 50 schools from the shift system.
So then, the society should have a conversation about how we fund education under an austerity budget. Removal of auxiliary fees in a context where you do not have sufficient numbers of trained teachers at the pre-primary level is populist, not socialist, and definitely not in the best interest of our development. To say you are removing auxiliary fees and not replacing the existing fees in each school is explicitly a policy of defunding schools, which must lead to poorer quality education.
Removal of auxiliary fees when you still have schools on the shift system is not equality, it is the entrenchment of an apartheid system in education.
Jack Mandora, mi nuh choose none!
– Basil Waite is a former Government senator