Latest update April 23rd, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 03, 2016 Letters
Dear Editor;
We are still in the Golden Jubilee Year of Independence. We are past the end of September, by which time schools should have settled down for the new school-year. And we have reached the end of “Education Month.”
It is now apposite to take a backward glance at the performance of the Primary School Sector, as measured by 2016 National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) Results, and the performance of the Secondary Sector, as measured by 2016 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Examination Results.
In the first place, the website of the Ministry of Education informs us that 14,386 pupils wrote the 2016 NGSA. We know that half of these pupils are boys. We also learnt that the performance in English and Social Studies has been consistent with previous years, but Mathematics and Science fell below that of previous years.
The names of the ‘top’ One Percent and their primary schools have been given wide publicity in the newspapers. However, we are yet to obtain the true picture. In the Kaieteur News of Sunday, July 24, 2016 a private school advertised the performance of its candidates, stating the score of each pupil as a percentage of the highest possible score of 583 marks (which is a Standardised Score or Converted Score).
A better representation would have been as a percentage of the Raw Score (which is 240 marks). And so with the National Performance, we need to know how many pupils out of the fourteen thousand got half of the work right, that is 50% of the Raw Score.
If we are doing nearly as good as previous years, it means that half of the pupils score less than half of the exam marks. And most of them proceed to secondary school after NGSA. Therefore, their secondary school performance is pre-determined.
In the second place, the Ministry of Education website informs us that the candidates for the June 2016 CSEC Examination were: Public 8,269 and Private 4,540 (Total – 12,809). Of this total, it was 4,677 Male and 8,132 Female. We also learn that the Total Subject Entries was: 73,303 (that is an average of about 5 subjects per candidate). As with NGSA, there is wide publicity of the achievements of the national and regional ‘top’ students. We also learnt that schools with 60% and more passes are 37 schools (it is assumed that ‘Pass’ means Grades I-III, and not I-IV, and that 37 schools include Private Schools). Now since there are nearly 100 Public Secondary Schools, we want to know more about the performance of 70+ Public Secondary Schools.
For example, the Ministry of Education must let us know how many students in each school are matriculating (passing 5 subjects with English A and Mathematics), who will then proceed to Higher Education. Since parents must send their child to the secondary school within the area, which is understandable, it is useful for the parents to have certain expectations of that school.
It is not unreasonable for each school to make its own analysis in terms of the foregoing, and to publicise it at PTA meetings and at Graduation Exercises, instead of stating percentage passes in individual subjects only. This latter practice does not reveal the true picture of the whole scenario, especially when a school obtains high percentage passes in subjects with a handful of students.
And now, 50 years after Independence, and with 100+ functioning Public and Private Secondary schools in all regions, we need to know more precisely how the Public Primary Schools and the Public Secondary Schools are performing.
It is not intended to apportion blame to teachers, since there are many parents at fault from Nursery to Secondary, as they shirk their responsibility to send their children to school regularly and punctually, and to supervise their homework. That is why those children under-achieve and eventually drop out of school. But how many?
I hope that the real figures will soon be available. I also hope that soon the Freedom of Information Bill will be tabled and passed in Parliament and that its scope will be adequate enough for persons like myself to have access to information that rightly belongs to the public.
Walter B. Alexander,
Former Administrator of SSRP (Secondary School Reform Project)
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