The school year has started. After the back-to-school frenzy in shopping malls, students across the nation sit in classrooms with new uniforms, new shoes, new school supplies, new bags. For these students, parents, teachers, principals and their staff there is a sense of great hope and anticipation that comes with these new things. It is a chance to do better, to make resolutions to work harder, to achieve more. Parents lecture their children hoping to instill the determination, commitment, fortitude and stamina they will need to pass their exams. They themselves prepare to find the money to pay for extra lessons and ensure their children can attend school every day. Some prepare to devote hours of their time supervising homework, helping with projects, getting children to and from extra-curricular activities. Principals lecture their staff and students with a view to inspiring them to work hard, to be disciplined, to commit to improving on last year’s examination results.

The reality is that overall little is going to change. It is highly likely that in August next year, when the 2017 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination results are published, we will once again be despondent because the percentage of students who achieved acceptable CSEC scores of grades I-III remains around 66 to 68 per cent.

There are many reasons for this, but none so influential as the fact that we have not done enough to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our teachers. In Jamaica the reality is that many of our teachers are well-intentioned, passionate, caring, and committed to going beyond the call of duty. Unfortunately, however, they are not teaching in ways that will produce the learning outcomes students need to be ready for the job market both locally and abroad.

This position is supported by the baseline report of the 2015 Jamaican National Education Inspectorate (NEI). After inspecting 953 public primary and secondary schools between September 2010 and March 2015, the report concludes “teaching in support of learning was rated as good in six per cent of the schools inspected; satisfactory in 49 per cent; unsatisfactory in 44 per cent; and needs immediate support in one per cent. Thus 45 per cent of the teaching students receive in Jamaica was found to be ineffective”.

A MATTER OF (QUALITY) TIME

A similar conclusion about the poor quality of teaching in Jamaica was presented by a major World Bank study (Bruns, B and Javier L, 2014):

Great Teachers: How to Raise Student Learning in Latin America and the Caribbean. Using international standards for effective teaching as a benchmark, the research compared teacher performance in seven Latin American countries, including Jamaica. The study measured teachers’ use of instructional time; teachers’ use of materials, including computers and other ICT; teachers’ core pedagogical practices; and teachers’ ability to keep students engaged. The results for Jamaica show that, on average, over the course of a school day, 28 per cent of each day (two hours) is spent on classroom management. Eleven per cent of the day (40 minutes) is spent off-task — teachers are absent from the room or engaging in social interactions with others and students. Teachers actually teach only 60 per cent (four hours) each day. Of those four hours, they engage all their students to learn in a meaningful way only 20 per cent (one hour and 20 minutes) of the time.

This data suggests we have a problem. If our teachers are off-task 40 minutes a day, this adds up to 22 days of wasted instructional time over the course of a school year. If our teachers are teaching poorly they are robbing students of the chance to achieve at school. Research across the globe shows that no other attribute of schools comes close to the impact of a good teacher on student achievement. It has been found that over the course of a single school year students with a weak teacher are likely to master only 50 per cent or less of the curriculum for that grade; students with a good teacher can master the curriculum as required. Students with great teachers can go beyond the year’s curriculum and advance 1.5 grade levels or more (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2010).

Many people think the problem of poor quality teaching has nothing to do with them. Many are ignorant of what goes on in our schools. This needs to change. The reality is the effects of ineffective and inefficient teaching reach far beyond school walls with serious social and economic consequences for everyone. Consider the idea that an education system marred by poor teaching is socially unjust. When the NEI surveyed 92,000 individual students and had group discussions with 1,990 students, they found “there is significant dissonance between the general awareness of our students and their eagerness to learn, when this is compared to their actual performance on the external examinations”. This means our students are eager to learn but because of poor teaching, they are unable to get the results they dream of receiving. In short, because of poor teaching we are letting them down. Students who are unlucky enough to get a poor quality teacher are robbed of the opportunity to do well. Students whose parents can afford to pay for extra help to offset the effects of poor teaching may recover, but what happens to those students whose parents do not have the means to do so? Consider, too, how unjust it is that parents of students who are underachieving because of poor teaching find themselves having to pay someone to re-teach their children. In effect they are paying twice for their children’s education.

RETURN OF INVESTMENT

The truth is poor quality teaching is a serious economic issue for everyone who pays taxes. It is the revenues from tax collections that help foot the bill of our annual budget.

In 2015 the Ministry of Education received $79.3 billion for recurrent expenses and $1.97 billion for capital spending. (

jis.gov.jm/budget-641-56-billion-201516/) This was 19 per cent or almost one-fifth of the money spent to run the country for that year. If, as the NEI says, almost half our schools and teachers are ineffective, it means we are getting a very poor return on the money we have invested in education. We are also failing to capitalise on the best resource we have for the future — our young people.

Economists suggest there is a direct link between levels of student achievement and the potential of a country to grow its economy. They show that countries whose students score highest in mathematics, science and reading on international assessment examinations are those that have the best quality teachers. These are the countries that are most likely to enjoy higher annual long-term GDP growth (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2012).

THE PROBLEM IS OURS TO FIX

What these high-ranking countries have in common is they have invested heavily in producing quality teachers. They understand the connection between high-quality teaching, high-quality student achievement, and economic growth. They have recognised that the production of efficient, effective teachers involves specific key elements. It needs initial training for teachers in programmes that teach theory but also emphasise learning to teach through a lot of clinical practice with quality feedback and input from well-trained supervisors.

After graduation the newly certified teacher needs a lot of support through mentoring by experienced teachers. New teachers benefit from at least a year of induction with activities and guidance to help them learn more about teaching and managing the classroom. All teachers need continuous support and opportunities to improve their teaching skills throughout their careers. Perhaps the important common feature of countries with quality teachers is the high level of respect and esteem accorded to the teaching profession. Teachers are valued and paid as highly as other professionals like doctors and lawyers.

In Jamaica, by contrast, many teachers report they feel unsupported. They feel demoralised and undervalued. They feel society does not understand what they do. They feel society does not respect them. Many of our teachers are unable to perform as well as they would like because they are seriously challenged by students’ lack of readiness for learning. This is influenced by factors such as poverty, crime, violence, undiagnosed learning challenges, poor leadership, overcrowded classrooms, poor infrastructure, poor parental involvement, lack of resources and ineffective teaching. Another challenge our teachers face is they enter the profession lacking sufficiently developed instructional competences. Many complain that they graduate from their teacher education programmes with sufficient theory, but they were not given enough time to learn and develop their actual teaching skills. When they graduate and enter the schoolroom, they are overwhelmed with learning to cope with poor working conditions and student learning challenges. They find themselves unable to find the time and energy to think about how to improve their instructional practices. The fallout from this is poor teaching, poor schooling, poor student achievement.

The problem of ineffective and inefficient teaching in Jamaican schools is a serious challenge that has to improve. This will only happen if we make addressing this challenge a national priority. Some will argue that the job of putting funding, policies and programmes in place to raise the level of teaching is the remit of the Ministry of Education. I agree, but the job of demanding that these policies and programmes are properly implemented is ours. Those of us in the education sector have to ensure the issue of poor quality teaching and how to address it becomes a key focus of national conversation. As a nation we have to insist our teachers receive the type of support that teachers in high-performing countries receive during training and after they start working in schools. We need to direct the attention of the business sector towards understanding the value of investment in teacher training and ongoing support. We need private and public stakeholders to see the connection between effective, efficient teaching and the success of Jamaica’s future. The quality of teaching in Jamaica has to matter!

Dr Carol Hordatt Gentles is a lecturer in teacher education in the School of Education, The University of the West Indies, Mona.