Ranking Schools on Unequal Ground Is Not Accountability

Jan 18, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

---

By  Karen Abrams, MBA. AA. Doctoral Candidate

(Kaieteur News) – Public schools in Guyana do not get to choose their students the way private schools do. That simple fact matters, yet it is missing from the current conversation around the Ministry of Education’s plan to introduce performance-based report cards and rank schools based on overall outcomes. When schools are evaluated without regard to who they serve and what those students bring with them into the classroom, rankings risk telling us far more about inequality than about school effectiveness.

The Ministry of Education has announced that, beginning as early as 2026, schools will receive performance-based report cards designed to strengthen accountability and encourage improvement across the system. The report cards will assess schools as institutions, not individual students, and will consider factors such as curriculum delivery, teacher attendance, and how resources are utilized. Schools will continue to be categorized within existing classifications such as A-list, B-list, and national schools, largely influenced by outcomes tied to the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA). The stated goal is to ensure that investments in education translate into better outcomes and national development.

Accountability is important. But accountability only works when it is fair.

Guyana is not an equal society, and our schools do not operate on equal ground. According to estimates cited by the Inter-American Development Bank, more than 50 percent of Guyanese live in poverty, with about 32 percent living in extreme poverty. In a country of fewer than one million people, this means hundreds of thousands of children are growing up in households where basic needs compete daily with educational priorities. Poverty affects nutrition, early childhood exposure to language and numeracy, access to books and technology, time available for parental support, and the ability to pay for private lessons that have become a quiet but powerful force shaping academic outcomes.

The NGSA system assigns students to secondary schools based primarily on exam scores. Those scores, however, are not produced in a vacuum. They reflect years of accumulated advantage or disadvantage. Children from families who can afford consistent, high-quality lessons over many years enter the exam room with a fundamentally different preparation profile than children whose parents cannot. When we then use NGSA-linked outcomes to rank schools, we are not simply measuring what happens inside the school walls. We are measuring parental income, household stability, and access to out-of-school supports.

In that context, school rankings risk becoming a mirror of social inequality rather than a measure of teaching quality or institutional effectiveness. Schools that consistently receive students with high NGSA scores will continue to look “successful.” Schools serving children who enter secondary school already behind will appear to struggle, even if teachers and administrators are making meaningful progress with the students in front of them.

This problem is not unique to Guyana. In the United States, decades of reform efforts and hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into improving math outcomes through testing, accountability systems, and instructional interventions. Yet national math performance has shown only marginal improvement, with persistent gaps linked closely to socio-economic status. Large-scale analyses repeatedly show that test-based accountability, when detached from social context, delivers limited returns and often misidentifies the source of educational failure or success. The lesson is clear. Measuring outcomes without addressing underlying inequality produces data, not solutions.

Against that backdrop, the Ministry of Education’s 2025 report that there has been a 15-point improvement in the number of students passing math at NGSA level deserves careful attention. If sustained and independently validated, this would represent an extraordinary result by international standards. Around the world, education systems struggle for incremental gains in mathematics, often measured in low single digits over long periods of time. A shift of this magnitude would attract serious interest from education researchers globally. It would raise important questions about what specific instructional, curricular, or system-level changes contributed to that improvement and whether they can be replicated or sustained.

But even strong system-wide gains do not erase the reality that schools start from very different places. Ranking schools as though they all operate under the same conditions risks demoralizing teachers in high-need schools and rewarding circumstances rather than effort. Public schools are tasked with serving every child who arrives at their gate. Any accountability framework that ignores that truth is incomplete.

If we are serious about improving education, we must be honest about what our metrics actually measure. Without adjusting for poverty, prior learning gaps, and access to external support, school rankings will not tell us who is teaching well or who is leading effectively. They will tell us which communities are better resourced. That may be uncomfortable to confront, but it is far more dangerous to ignore.

Accountability should illuminate how much value a school adds to a child’s learning journey, not simply where that child started. Until our evaluation systems reflect that distinction, we risk mistaking inequality for performance and calling it progress.

---

• accountability, Karen Abrams, ranking, schools, Unequal Ground

---