Latest update April 20th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 02, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Let us not be fooled by the deservedly happy faces on those top students who recently sat the National Grade Six Assessment, or what was previously referred to as the Common Entrance Examination.
Those whose names appeared in the newspapers represent the cream of the cream of the crop, the top one per cent of the over 17,000 students that sat these examinations.
There will be another four per cent which represent the cream of the country’s top performers at that level. They will gain spots to the top schools around the country.
For the remaining 95 per cent however, the results will not be encouraging and these will be relegated to junior secondary schools, most of which do not perform creditably at the ‘O’ Level examinations.
In short, we are dooming thousands of students to a third rate and fourth rate education because they are not likely in the schools to which they will be assigned to produce the results that would qualify them for work in the job market.
This has to be one of the great worries facing the Minister of Education who, I believe, is capable of transforming the country’s educational system if he is given the resources and leverage.
I believe that he knows the gravity of the crisis. Certainly, the results that he announced this week should cause the government to summon a national emergency of education in Guyana.
There has been no detailed analysis of the breakdown of all the students by region but from what is discernable from the top 180-odd performers, we do have a serious problem.
The bulk of those that were in the top one per cent were from schools in Georgetown. The other Regions performed not as good in this small sample I am sure that if we do the analysis down the line to the top quartile that the results would be shocking.
In addition, it has already been pointed out that a shocking number of those that sat the Common Entrance Examination failed in the critical subject areas of Mathematics and English.
Increased supervision of schools as mooted by the education authorities is not going to reverse this trend.
This will only lead to small changes in the percentages with the education system continuing to fail the overwhelming majority of students.
There has to be a comprehensive approach to dealing with this problem beginning with ensuring that the non-Georgetown primary and nursery schools are staffed by suitable teachers.
I have said before that retiring teachers at age 55 is not the ideal thing to do considering the high turnover and migration rate within the teaching sector.
I have no problems with a fifty-five-year retirement within other areas of the government but I believe that ince there is an acute shortage of trained and experienced teachers within the system, since many of our best brains are to be found teaching in the islands of the Caribbean, in Africa and in North America, we need to get back into our schools, especially non-Georgetown schools, the best teachers we can have, many of whom are retired and at home.
I hope that the Minister of Education, who I consider as a management specialist and someone who understands business and the business of education, to give thought to two pilot projects for out-of-town areas.
The first should be to recruit back into the school system some retired trained graduate teachers.
I am sure that many of these teachers will be willing even if it is on a part-time basis on the existing salary scale to go back and work with the rural schools.
This should help to boost standards in teaching within these schools which now need some affirmative support from Ministries.
The second pilot project that I would suggest would be to integrate the business community with some of these schools. In this regard I am not referring to what obtained in the past where some companies adopted schools.
That model may have been applicable when there was a shortage of funds to repair schools and thus by putting schools up for adoption guaranteed that they would receive some assistance from their sponsors.
What I have in mind is something much different. I would like business firms and companies to be directly engaged in promoting a mentorship program within schools by having some of their top executives go into these schools and teach and guide the children.
Given also what the results of this year’s examinations reveal, I believe that the government should move to appoint School Boards in every school in Guyana and in cases where this may be problematic because of the lack of personnel to convert the Parent Teacher Associations into interim School Boards.
The overall strategy has to be to allow the educational stakeholders to play a greater role in the education of Guyana’s school children.
This is a far better option than simply going back to the tried, tested and failed system of increasing teaching supervision.
Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
Apr 20, 2024
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