GTU flays Chief Education Officer for statement on student failure

Mar 17, 2012 News

-says ‘No Child Left Behind policy poorly implemented

The Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) is calling on the Chief Education Officer (CEO), Olato Sam, to

Olato Sam, Chief Education Officer

provide data or evidence to substantiate his recent statement that many children were “doomed to fail” because of teachers.
According to Colin Bynoe, President of GTU, comments made by Sam during a recent conference with South Georgetown teachers were unprofessional and do not represent the truth of the implementation of the ‘No Child Left Behind Policy.’
He noted that teachers should not be blamed for students’ adverse reaction towards the policy since it was poorly implemented by the Ministry.
“We must take into consideration that when this programme came into being there was no proper advocacy…There were hardly any public meetings and no television programme for parents to fully understand the policy,” Bynoe stated.
Bynoe pointed out that teachers are teaching but many parents are unsupportive and this indirectly causes students to disrespect the education system.
“Children say they don’t have to fight up to pass no class because school has to forward them to the next class and that is bad. You cannot move mediocrity and take them to another level until they matriculate.”
Bynoe emphasised that Sam should provide evidence to justify why he would blame some teachers for the failure of these children. The union leader questioned if this is a widespread scenario in Guyana and queried what the Education Ministry is doing to correct this situation.
He asserted that to date GTU has not seen any reports or actions by the Ministry to rectify that situation the CEO claimed exists.
In highlighting teachers’ plight of unsupportive parents, Bynoe emphasised that the evidence is in the Parent Teachers’ Conference Reports which are submitted to the Regional Educational Officers.
He said those reports would reveal that about 75 percent of parents do not attend those conferences- a large portion represents parents of students who have been failing the system and are reluctant to attend these classes.
Bynoe stressed that if the CEO was reading those reports he would have realised the challenges teachers encounter and help derive solutions rather than “take things from the sky and make a statement with it.”
While admitting that students failed in the past, Bynoe stressed that Sam should provide the populace and GTU with empirical data comparing the pass rates before and after the policy’s implementation.
He related that even if Sam posits that with the repetition of a class, students are not benefiting from the subjects they would have passed, the Ministry needs to provide a mechanism other than the remediation programme to correct the failure first before promotion.

Colin Bynoe, President, GTU

“The remediation programme alone is not enough to help this situation. The first thing they need to do is get parents to understand what they are trying to do for those children who have been repeating classes and for parents to give schools the respective support mechanism so that teachers could try to correct the levels of failures that we have in the system,” Bynoe said.