THAT EMPTY FEELING OF BEING LEFT BEHIND

Mar 24, 2013 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

It’s that time of the year and here we go again!
A report on Friday last confirmed that tomorrow and the following day, some 17,000 candidates will be sitting this year’s National Grade Six Assessment. Good luck and best wishes to all.
The aforementioned figure is similar to the numbers of the past two years – 17,392 in 2011 and 17,138 in 2012. In 2010, it was a little under 15,000.
But enough about those figures, it’s more important that a few core issues are examined.
Guyana has consistently produced some of the top performers in the region in the CSEC and CAPE examinations. Our top students have kept the Golden Arrowhead flying.
The results demonstrate that Guyana is still producing quality graduates from within the school system, students who can match the best in the world. But below the crème de la crème lies the real problem. Below that top layer, there are serious problems within most of the regions. Most of the top performers are coming from too limited a geographic span.
This in part is attributable to the distribution of the population. With the bulk of the population residing in Regions Three and Four, one expects that schools in those regions would dominate national and regional examinations.
But something is seriously wrong when a region like Region Six, as was the case last year, was not represented in the list of top performers in the National Grade Six Assessment, and when for many years prior it has only managed a few within the bracket of elite performers.
It represents a serious crisis within the educational system and one that shows a failure of policy. The cry now must be for a revamping of the system.
The situation in education mirrors national development. Guyana has since 1989 been pursuing a neo-liberal model of development. This model has brought progress to all regions of Guyana. It has sustained growth and led to the rising of all economic classes. It has however to a much less extent been able to reduce the inequality gap.
The inequality in performance with the educational system needs to be addressed urgently because education is for the poor and the escape route out of their deprivations.
There is no doubt that the system has improved. But when it comes to the performance of students, the out-of- town regions continue to lag behind.
Policy changes have to be driven by data and this is perhaps the one area where greater attention needs to be paid. If only limited data is available about school attendance, performance and teacher qualifications, then the policy makers are hamstrung and forced to act on intuition rather than verifiable facts.
The government can boast about the improvements in education. In so doing it can also point to producing the top performers in the Caribbean consistently. But below that glitter, there is a serious issue of the inequitable performance across regions and the government needs to address why this is happening.
The problem is not just limited to the primary schools. A similar trend manifested itself at the secondary level and forced the Education Ministry to launch a special initiative to deal with schools whose performance need improving.
Now it should also be clear that there is a serious crisis within the educational system. All the national strategies that have been developed have not reduced the problems associated with inequitable performance across the regions. A new strategy is needed; one that addresses how to reduce performance gaps nationwide.
The problem may be with the quality of teachers. Many of the top performers at both the primary and secondary levels have related that they went to extra lessons. So the problem may be in the quality of the teaching that is available.
There may be sufficient teachers but are there sufficient good teachers? What incentives are available to retain good teachers and motivate them to help the poor performers?
Even if the incentives can be found to retain good teachers, there is still a problem of how can the system be turned around? How can this be turned around? What can be done?
It is simply not fair to the children outside of the urban centres to be so disadvantaged that each year when the results of national or regional examinations appear, they do not make the cut. Since they do not make the cut they are likely to experience that empty feeling of being left behind.
And when large numbers of students from one area are left behind, there is an even greater risk that the area will be economically left behind because the skills for development will simply not be there.

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THAT EMPTY FEELING OF BEING LEFT BEHIND

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