Every year, when Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) results are released, Jamaicans eagerly examine the performance of high schools. Newspapers publish rankings, social media celebrates institutions with impressive pass rates, and parents naturally ask which schools are the “best”.

Academic performance matters. Schools must be accountable for the quality of education they provide; however, using examination results as the primary measure of a school’s effectiveness can create a misleading picture when we do not consider which students a school receives, how those students are placed, and who ultimately sits the examinations.

The issue is not whether CSEC and CAPE results should matter. They should. The issue is whether they tell us enough to judge the work of a school fairly.

Not all secondary schools begin with the same student population. Some receive students with strong academic foundations, supportive home environments, access to private tutoring and educational resources, and fewer barriers to learning.

Other schools serve significant numbers of students who arrive with learning gaps, attendance difficulties, limited access to resources, and challenging socio-economic circumstances. Their teachers may have to spend years addressing literacy, numeracy, motivation, behaviour, and other barriers before students are ready to perform at their full academic potential. This distinction matters.

The Jamaica Education Transformation Commission’s 2021 report recognised that judging schools simply by examination outcomes can be misleading, because student characteristics and socio-economic circumstances influence educational performance. Therefore, a school with an 80 per cent pass rate is not automatically doing more effective educational work than one with a 50 per cent pass rate. The more meaningful question is: How much progress did the school help its students to make?

There is another issue that deserves greater public attention: Who is included in the percentage? A 90 per cent pass rate sounds impressive, but 90 per cent of whom? If a school enters 100 students and 90 pass, that is different from a school enrolling 200 eligible students but entering only 100, of whom 90 pass.

The resulting percentages may look identical, but the educational stories are not. This is why cohort participation matters. We should know how many students were eligible to sit examinations, how many actually sat them, how many gained certification, and what happened to those who were not entered.

Jamaica has grappled with concerns about students being screened out of CSEC examinations because their results might lower a school’s overall pass rate. That history should make us cautious about treating examination percentages as a complete measure of school effectiveness.

Streaming also complicates comparisons. Placing students into groups based on academic readiness can help teachers respond to different learning needs. The concern arises when academic placement becomes a way of separating students expected to produce strong examination results from those considered less likely to succeed.

Imagine two schools with similar enrolment. School A’s strongest students are concentrated in programmes designed around examination success, while weaker students follow alternative pathways or sit fewer external examinations. School B enters almost its entire eligible cohort, including students across the academic spectrum.

If School A records a 90 per cent pass rate and School B records 60 per cent, it would be simplistic to conclude that School A is necessarily the better school. The results may be telling us something about the students who were examined rather than the total educational contribution of the institution.

This brings us to an important distinction: Student achievement and school effectiveness are not the same thing. A student who enters high school already performing exceptionally well and leaves with outstanding CSEC results has achieved something commendable. The school deserves credit for maintaining and developing that ability.

But consider a student who enters significantly below grade level and, after five years, earns passes in several CSEC subjects. That student’s school may have produced considerable educational growth even though its overall pass rate is lower. This is the value-added argument. We should consider where students started, not only where they finished.

We, therefore, need to ask better questions: Where did students begin? How much did they improve? What proportion of the eligible cohort sat the examinations? What happened to students who struggled? How effectively does the school support students with different learning needs?

These questions do not make examination results less important. They make our interpretation of those results more intelligent.

ricardo.professional.edu@gmail.com.