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New Year old habits of indiscipline

Jan 04, 2011 Editorial

A new year has dawned but it would seem that old habits persist and that there is increasingly a need for new tactics. Schools re-opened yesterday but rather than the teachers making a positive effort to turn over a new leaf by being punctual and regular, many were absent from the first day of the new school term.
The rule is that teachers who miss the last day and the first day of a term automatically forfeit the salaries for that period. If the teacher proceeded on leave and the period of leave spanned the closing and opening session or if the period leave began at the end of the term and continued into the new term then that is considered a valid excuse.
However, the teacher is considered absent under any other condition. And that absence carries with it a stipulated penalty.
For all the talk about teachers being desperate for money one cannot readily imagine a teacher foregoing almost one month’s pay. In the case of teachers being absent on the first day after the August holidays then the penalty is two months’ pay.
Something suggests that there would be little or no penalty for those who chose to absent themselves because more often than not the administration is extremely lax. The administrator of the school is likely to turn a blind eye as they did when teachers left the classes to pursue studies at the University of Guyana without care or consideration for the children they happened to be teaching. In many cases the administrators did not report the breach and it took complaints from parents to bring this lapse to public notice.
More recently, there was the Neesa Gopaul issue that led to some people contending that they were made scapegoats. In every case people said that they did all that was necessary but that the chain of command failed and in the end blame was apportioned down the ladder.
Within recent times there has been a lot of attention on the Ministry of Education largely because of the apparent increase in fail rates and because of the increasing levels of illiteracy. Minister Shaik Baksh has for the past year been talking about measures being put in place to halt the decline and while it is too early to talk about successes and failures we could talk about a noticeable halt in the decline.
However, there has been no report on what has been happening, at great cost. We knew from some teachers who were asked to perform remedial work during the August vacation that there was a problem with payment. We also know that this has since been corrected.
We know, too, that the Ministry has put measures in place to help those children who fail at the external examinations. It has also set in motion, a system to aid those may be lagging behind prior to the external examinations. But we do know that it takes a special skill to aid in remedial learning. To use the very teachers with whom the slow learner lags is not very imaginative.
This is why for nearly five years there has been a strident call for the Education Ministry to recruit retired teachers. There has been some lip service on the part of the administration to this development but not much else.
The school in the city that was identified as a remedial learning centre was closed without notice and not a peep has been heard. Surely, something must be wrong with the manner the education system is being administered. There is no communication with the stakeholders and there certainly is no move to ensure a change in the short term. This is why teachers are taking liberties increasingly.
The administration also exhibits a measure of disrespect for the stakeholders. Even before the outgoing Acting Chief Education Officer had retired on December 31, 2010, the Ministry rushed to appoint and confirm a new Chief Executive Officer. This contributes to the breakdown in the system.
The new Chief Education Officer, mere days into his appointment, must now deal with the first hurdle, disciplining those teachers who refused to report for duty today.

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