Education Defensiveness

Aug 17, 2012 Editorial

In response to our editorial “Education Hypocrisy”, Chief Education Officer (CEO) Mr. Olato Sam, found it necessary to respond with a claim that the said editorial was “highly insulting and fraught with inaccuracies.” We believe that Mr. Sam is being more than a tad defensive and certainly ‘protesteth too much.”
But since we believe that a very important issue is at stake here – the education of our future, our youth, we will examine Mr. Sam’s claims.
The CEO claims our editorial “suggests” that the “(Education) Ministry conspired to dupe the public in the dissemination of this year’s CSEC results” and that this “is untrue and highly disrespectful.” What we actually said was, “The Ministry of Education (MoE) felt it necessary to ask the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) to release the names of those students who passed more than eight subjects with Grade One. From the approximately 13,000 that sat the last CSEC exams, 175 names were submitted. This is a shame and a disgrace from several angles. Firstly why does the Ministry continue with this farce of focusing only on the one percent “high flyers” that would do well in any random sample? Do they want to take the credit for their success? We’re sure they do. Has the Ministry taken note that every one of the ‘high flyers’ from Queen’s College – the premier school in the country , collecting the top 1% from the 6th Grades – mentioned that they had to resort to ‘outside lessons?”
Mr. Sam did not deny that the MoE made the above request but proffered two reasons for its deployment. Firstly that, “one has to accept, whether we agree or not, that the nation has grown used to the practice of recognizing the “high flyers”. So the Ministry in charge of the nation’s education just goes with the flow? This betrays a sad lack of leadership. Secondly, the CEO says, “these students do deserve praise for their hard work and above average achievements.” Of course they do – but why ask for their results ahead of the other 13,500 students who took the exams? Wouldn’t they be “praised” then? Call us “cynical” but not ‘insulting” when we conclude the MoE wanted to mask the overall atrocious results, unlike what occurred in Jamaica.
The CEO also took exception to our claim that eight subject passes were “the Ministry’s cut-off criterion for what is a ‘good’ result”. He indignantly pointed out that the Ministry had always emphasised that passes in five subjects was the ‘matriculation’ requirement. That may be so; but why did not the MoE, if it just had to innocently get a peek at the results, ask for passes at five or more subjects?
Making a very cavilling complaint, the CEO says we implied in the above quote that the 1% of high flyers at CSEC mentioned above were the same as the 1% of high flyers at the Grade Six assessments that ended up at Queen’s. As an English ‘comprehension’ exercise, we think it is clear we were referring to 1% of two distinct and separate aggregates. But the point about some CSEC high flyers coming from outside the ‘elite’ schools should remind the CEO of the MoE’s stated but evidently abandoned goal of doing away with such schools.
In response to our recommendation in light of Saraswati Vidya Niketan’s success (91% passes in Maths and English) because of extra tuition on the school’s premises by teachers at no extra cost, the CEO claims that “the Ministry of Education has never prohibited” such an approach.
Never prohibited? What about recommending and facilitating this approach? We recommend to him and the MoE the move by the Jamaican MoE, after digesting their CSEC results that were better than ours, to enact legislation towards this end.
The demonstrated success of the MoE’s ‘pilot school’ project to improve performance in Mathematics and English, which includes extra tuition as a component, should suggest to the CEO that he should be less defensive and more proactive. We remind him that respect is earned not demanded.

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Education Defensiveness

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