All not equal

Jul 08, 2009 Editorial

Now that the excitement around the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) results has hopefully subsided, we can possibly begin to assess the assessment. This is now the third year that the scores from the assessments in the second and fourth grades have been added onto the final one from the sixth grade to determine which secondary schools the children will be attending.
This innovation was supposed to circumvent the all-or-nothing nature of the one-off old Common Entrance. It does not appear, however, that anything has changed.
One persistence of the old regime is the overweening domination of Georgetown in the results – especially the top one per cent.
With at the most some thirty-percent of the national population, Georgetown received sixty-four percent of who coveted top percentile. The regions where the performance percent best matched their populations were Regions Two and Three with respectively six and 13 per cent of the population and garnering five and 11 per cent of the passes. Region Four (outside of Georgetown) with nine per cent of the population obtained six per cent while all the other regions did much worse. Region Five, Six and Ten with 10 per cent, 20 per cent and five per cent of the population could only scrape together three per cent, eight per cent and two per cent respectively – less than half their ratios. Regions One, Seven, Eight, and Nine – the interior regions populated mostly by our indigenous peoples with eight per cent of the population just placed one per cent – two children – in the top one per cent.
While the presence of a few faces from the regions outside Georgetown invariably invoke expressions of pleasure in the authorities that progress is being in the age-old problem of delivering education equitably across the country, the numbers cited above unfortunately do not really justify any celebration. Since intelligence is distributed randomly we have to look elsewhere for the cause of the disparity in the performance between Georgetown and the other regions.
While it may stem from a multitude of sources, the disparate levels of qualified teachers between the two systems has to be right up there at the top. Private schools – all from Georgetown – and all charging fees that attract highly qualified teachers – copped an astounding 39 per cent of top one percentile.
This factor has augmented the traditional pattern of the Georgetown schools being able to better attract trained teachers than the rural and hinterland regions. While the Ministry of Education has commendably broadened the training of teachers into the regions, it is obvious that we have a long way to go.
It is imperative that new incentives be deployed expeditiously to rectify the structural imbalance in qualified teachers in urban versus rural schools.
The perennial success of Leonora Primary from rural Region Three – thirteen of the twenty top one per cent places from that region this year – however, shows that some responsibility for the poor performance of rural schools has to be placed at the school level.
Leonora has been able to achieve and maintain success first and foremost because its head teachers – from its founding as a self-help school in the sixties – took its motto, “Strive ever excellence”, very seriously.
Good performance in any institution starts from the top and this is true to a greater degree in the delivery of education. The curriculum of teaching institutions inevitably take on a middle-class bias and in the rural areas, the teachers have to be motivated to be very creative to bring their charges up to the bar.
It is left to the head teachers to provide that motivation. Leonora’s success also demonstrates that success breeds success since it has been able to obtain significant support from local and foreign alumni.
A few years ago, the Ministry announced an initiative that would reward head teachers for improved performances in their schools but it seemed to have died on the vine.
The skewed results exposed in our top one percent at the NGSA suggest that that scheme – and others – ought to be revisited. We cannot afford some schools being more equal than others.

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