Jagdeo confounds himself

Feb 17, 2024 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News – In his Press Conference of the 8th February 2024,  Bharrat Jagdeo made liberal use of statistics to try to make a case that his government is committed to improving education in Guyana. But if he seriously reflects on the metrics he provided he will discover that his own numbers make a stronger case of the failure of the delivery of education in Guyana.

As is his instinctive habit, he had to bring the APNU+AFC into the discourse. He argued that the APNU+AFC only spent G$52.7B on education in 2019 as against the more than doubling of education expenditure this year to G$135B. But the spending by the APNU +AFC on education in 2019 represented  17% of the total Budget for that year, as compared to the slightly more than 10% which Jagdeo’s government allocated for this year. In other words, the APNU+AFC government was spending relatively greater share of the Budget on education in 2019 than the oil-flush PPPC in 2024.

Jagdeo then sought to argue that in 2019, the APNU+AFC was spending $310,000 per child as compared to the G$694,000 that is being spent today. The per capita spending on education is more than double that of 2019.

What Jagdeo did not state is that almost G$25 B has been set aside for maintenance, rehabilitation and construction of schools this year because of the flush of oil funds. On the other hand, the Coalition government was only able to allocate some G$3.7B in 2019 to capital works in the education sector. It is this massive increase in capital spending that primarily, not exclusively, accounts for the more than doubling of the per capita expenditure under the PPPC in 2024.

Jagdeo then misleads himself in attempting to argue that the government was spending more per capita on education than what is being paid on average by parents for private education. But this can hardly be a plus for the government. It does suggest that the delivery of public education is far too costly and is inefficient.

In a letter to the media by the Ministry of Education, published in yesterday’s Stabroek News, the Ministry said that in 1990, Guyana’s pass rate in Mathematics was 16.89% and in English it was 13.36. By 2022, Guyana’s pass rate in mathematics was 34.28% and in English 70.84%. It has not dawned on the Ministry that it has taken more than thirty years for these improvements.

Regardless also of whether the local CXC passes are comparable with those of counterpart states in the Caribbean, the per capita increase in educational expenditure is not yielding commensurate improvements in education attainment

But what the Ministry is not admitting are the extremely high failure rates for children who write the National Grade Six Assessment. In 2013, 43.94% of students that wrote the National Grade Six Assessment (formerly the Common Entrance) secured passes over 50% while in 2014, 31.52% secured passes over 50%. This is the mess in which the PPPC left the education sector.

The Ministry of Education should exit the denial mode. The Education Sector Plan 2021-2025 reported that the education system is beset by low completion and high dropout rates. Compounding this is the poor matriculation rate for secondary school students which the Education Sector Plan 2021-2025 was during the last plan period was 36%. Last year, the matriculation rate was said to be 65% which even if true is still poor.

The issue that Jagdeo and the PPPC are missing, concerns the distribution of the resources allocated to the education sector. While heralding that the PPPC has expanded spending in the sector by more than 150% over the 2019 level, teachers are pointing out that their salaries have not increased anywhere near this percentage. In fact, on an NCN radio programme, a senior PPPC official said that if you compound the salary increases for public servants since 2020, central government workers salaries have increased by 33%.

The teachers are not disputing that the education sector is not being properly resourced. They are contending that their share of the increased resource allocation is not satisfactory.

We cannot solve the woes in our education system without teachers. The government and the teachers need to sit down and negotiate improvements not only in salaries but also in terms of holding teachers responsible for the poor performance of public education.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Bharrat Jagdeo, education, Peeping Tom

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