by Leela Ramdeen, Chair of the Catholic Commission for Social Justice
“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” (Diogenes Laertius)
Our Education system continues to be in the throes of “educational reform” with no clear philosophy about the kind of person we want to see at the end of the process. Let’s draw on the work of researchers such as Malcolm Baldrige (see: Characteristics of High Performing Schools) and Howard Gardner (see his theory of Multiple Intelligences) and Robert Marzano et al (see their Nine Instructional Strategies that “are most likely to improve student achievement across all content areas and across all grade levels”), and the standards of achievements and evaluation/inspection schedules for schools that have been developed by various countries?
Minister of Education, Hon Tim Gopeesingh, said recently that there is a huge gap between the number of students who enter secondary school and those who actually graduate with five subjects, including Maths and English.
He realises the importance of developing intervention policies for Infants and Standard One. The results of the National Test in Standard One show that one out of every two students who take this exam score below 50% in certain subjects. The results of the National Test in Standard Three in the same subjects show that the same 50% of the students score about 50%.
Too many of our children underachieve. This year, of the 17,280 students who sat SEA, 1,718 scored 30% or less. 71.4% of these were males. And we wonder why there are only 10% black boys at UWI. 408 students will repeat the year. It is unjust to make students repeat without adequate intervention strategies/programmes to meet their needs.
Read the article by Dan Harrison and Kim Arlington on July 15: “Repeat years do low-achievers no good”. They report on an analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – based on the results of international reading, math and science examinations taken by 15 year olds. It shows that: “forcing low-achieving students to repeat grades is a recipe for poor performance…Ben Jensen, a former OECD analyst who directs the school education programme at the Grattan Institute, Australia, said grade repetition generally reflected a poor response to children who were failing. ‘It is reactive rather than proactive. High-performing countries target resources and programmes at low-performing students at a very young age.’”
Richard Teese, Director of the Centre for Research on Education Systems, University of Melbourne, Australia, said, “While parents of low-performing students were told repeating grades would give their children the chance to catch up, this often did not happen because they were generally not given additional support or a different programme. ‘They are simply exposed to the same curriculum and teaching process, which didn’t work the first time around. Why should it work the second time around?’
“Prof Teese said keeping back students decreased their interest in school work and lowered their aspirations, stigmatized them and made them more vulnerable to negative peer pressures.”
Yet we continue with this practice in T&T. Why are 4,000 of our children dropping out of school? Why does our legislation still state that children can leave school at the age of 12?
Since 2004, the Education Discussion Group (EDG), of which I am Vice-President, has been sharing our ideas with those in authority about how we could enhance the quality of education in T&T. The 20 or so persons in this group have years of experience in the field of education, yet our views remain as whispers on the wind.
In its Strategy Report the Ministry of Education (MOE) has some laudable strategic objectives e.g. Design and develop a quality education system; develop a high performing and dynamic organisation. The MOE needs to: define what is meant by “a quality education system”; develop a framework for achieving it; be able to identify and measure whether it is achieving it. The MOE and schools must be data driven.
Students’ academic achievement is only one indicator of a quality education system. We cannot move forward unless we have: quality standards in Education, instruments/procedures for internal and external monitoring and evaluation; effective formative and summative assessment procedures; effective teacher training/ongoing professional development/appraisal; effective school/classroom leadership and management; an entitlement curriculum that is broad, balanced, relevant, coherent, differentiated – one that offers continuity and progression; high quality learning environments (see School and Classroom Design and Resources); instructional strategies that take into consideration the way in which children learn; effective home, school, community partnerships.
