Bring the teachers

Feb 20, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Guyana needs specialist teachers, particularly in the areas of Science, Math, and English. The poor performance of our children in these subject areas at regional examinations is the best proof that there is a crisis in certain subject areas and this crisis needs to be addressed immediately.
The problem is acute. There are children who are excelling in these subject areas, but there are far too many who are not. If it takes the importation of teachers to bring about a quick reversal of this problem, then so be it.
The argument will be made that we need to identify the source of the problem. We do. The source of the problem is known and even if we fix the source, it will take time to generate the some of returns that are needed. We do not have the luxury of time and therefore short- to medium-term solutions have to be implemented.
We cannot afford to wait for a long-term solution. Guyana cannot afford to wait even fifteen years for passes in these critical subject areas to increase.  If we are to meet the demands of the global economy, then we need to fix our educational system and fix it quickly, even if it means undertaking initiatives that will be controversial.
The teachers within our school system are going to feel threatened by any influx of foreign teachers. Change always brings about such fears, but experience has shown that these fears often turn out to be unfounded. There is no reason, however, for anyone to be fearful about the importation of foreign teachers. Guyana had imported teachers before, including teachers from Sri Lanka, and there was no massive public outcry against that decision. So why now?
It is not as if the teachers that are going to be imported are going to replace competent, trained and experienced teachers within the profession. No government is ever going to do that.
There are, of course, a large number of untrained teachers within our school system, too large in fact. Those teachers have to go. There should be no compromise on that. Our children should not be short-changed by having untrained teachers teaching them. They deserve better.
Education is too critical to national development for this to continue. There should be no place for untrained or unqualified teachers within the school system. From nursery level, we should be laying the foundation of effective tuition, because experience has revealed that when a child does not obtain a sound grounding from an early age, that child can be disadvantaged.
This is a major problem in Guyana. There are by far too many untrained teachers at the nursery level. There are vacancies for trained and graduate teachers within the system and there is a need to phase out untrained teachers.
Those teachers who are being phased out should not be, however, simply put out to pasture. They should be offered scholarships to pursue training at the Cyril Potter College of Education. They should be encouraged to upgrade themselves and to stay in teaching. The best way of doing this is to offer them a reasonable monthly stipend to attend the teachers’ training college.
We must also learn from past experience. When teachers were imported into Guyana in the 1980s, most of them were top-grade. But most of them were placed at the better-performing schools. This was a huge mistake because what should have happened, and one can only hope that the government recognizes this, is that pilot schools should be identified and the teachers placed at these schools.
The aim should be to have a few schools, one in each region, identified. Bring these specialist teachers and have them work at these schools which should be not the top-performing schools. It will raise the standards of these schools. This is what is needed. You do not need the better schools having these teachers, because all that will happen is that the same patterns will continue, whereby the top schools continue to dominate and there is no upgrading of the performance of other schools.
There are obviously going to be concerns and fears.  Local teachers will question why the need to import teachers and will ask about the remuneration. Local teachers will also fear being pushed out. It is, however, doubtful whether importing teachers for three subject areas can ever cause qualified teachers to lose their jobs. The Guyana government is never going to be able to attract enough overseas teachers to fill all the vacancies in the local system, much less to displace existing teachers. And the government should make it known that this policy is not about replacing trained teachers.
The government should also consider, as a first measure, trying to attract Guyanese teachers who had left to work in the Caribbean and who are now retired. Many of these persons still have the ability to teach and they may be very much willing to come back for stints of two years to aid in the resuscitation of education in Guyana. There are also retired teachers in Guyana who would be willing to return. Many of them have the experience of years of teaching and the knowledge of the syllabuses, and this is what is needed.
The demand for specialist teachers in Math, English and Science may not however be fully met from the retirees within the Caribbean and in Guyana, and therefore it seems inevitable that teachers will have to be hired from further afield. So bring them and bring them fast!

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