From 12% to 60%: What One Learner taught us about Guyana’s mathematics crisis

Aug 30, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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By Dr. Karen Abrams, MBA, AA

(Kaieteur News) – Express permission was granted by the guardian to discuss this story and some identifying details were changed.

A few  school terms ago, a grandmother walked into our office worried about her grandchild. The child had recently moved in with her and was attending a local high school. She had just received her report card, and her Mathematics grade was 12%. Yes, my friends, twelve percent. That is 12 out of 100, not on one bad examination, but as her Mathematics grade for the entire term.

Her grandmother had seen our advertisements for Pathway Online Academy but did not really understand how the programme worked. She knew, however, that she did not have either the time or money to arrange the kind of one-on-one, in-person tutoring she assumed her granddaughter desperately needed. The child had already attended traditional after-school lessons, but she was so far behind, and so ashamed of being behind, that she would sit quietly when she did not understand. She did not raise her hand and announce to a room full of other children that she did not know something they seemed to know. She simply remained lost.

This is an important part of our Mathematics crisis that we do not discuss enough. By the time some children reach secondary school, Mathematics is no longer simply a difficult subject. It has become an emotional burden. OECD research has repeatedly found a relationship between mathematics anxiety and poor performance, with lower-performing students reporting greater anxiety about the subject. Think about what that means for a child with 12%. She may already believe that she cannot do Mathematics, and every new equation becomes another opportunity to confirm what she has begun to believe about herself.

After hearing about the 12%, our Operations Manager and I decided to waive Pathway Online Academy’s GYD$5,000 monthly fee and enroll the learner as quickly as possible. But we understood something important about digital learning: putting a struggling child in front of a computer does not automatically produce learning. Online programmes often work best for motivated learners, students who already have reasonable academic foundations, and children whose parents or guardians monitor what they are doing.

The challenge is that children associate computers and phones with entertainment. Even when they remain on an educational platform, we have observed that they quickly learn how to beat poorly designed systems. They skip the reading, rush through quizzes, take them repeatedly until they learn the answers rather than the concepts, and move on. The computer records activity, but the child may have learned very little. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report has similarly warned that online learning requires considerable self-regulation and that younger and lower-performing learners can be especially vulnerable to disengagement. Technology can support learning, but technology itself is not the intervention.

We learned this through observing our own students. We studied how children moved through Pathway and redesigned the programme around the behaviours we were seeing. The platform now reflects significant improvements and engagement checkpoints intended to make it much harder for learners to simply click through lessons. AI is integrated into the programme, but AI is not the magic. The design around the learner matters far more.

For our 12% learner, we demanded one additional commitment. Her granny had to check the parent platform every day and review the summary report. That was it. No tutoring, no sitting beside her for an hour, no trying to relearn secondary-school Mathematics. She simply had to know whether the child was doing the work and monitor her progress. Research on parental engagement supports the value of giving parents specific, manageable ways to participate in their children’s education. That matters in Guyana because parents do not have to know enough Mathematics to tutor their children. They can still ask: Did you do the work? What did you learn? Show me your progress.

At the end of the next term, her Mathematics grade had moved from 12% to 38%. Some people will look at 38% and see failure. We saw movement. We saw a child who had been almost completely disconnected from Mathematics beginning to climb back into it. Thirty-eight percent was not the destination, but when you start at twelve, it means something important is changing. Then came the end-of-year report: Mathematics, 60%; from 12% to 60%.

I want to be careful because education research requires us to be careful. One child’s story does not prove that Pathway Online Academy caused a 48-percentage-point increase. Her school, teachers, maturity, home environment and other factors may also have contributed. But this case matters because the learner was intentionally followed, her engagement was monitored, her grandmother performed the limited oversight we requested, and hers is not the only significant improvement we have observed. The result therefore gives us something more useful than a marketing claim. It gives us a research question: what exactly happened here, and can we reproduce it for larger numbers of struggling learners? We are currently working with researchers associated with two US universities to study elements of our programme design more rigorously.

International research gives us reason to keep asking that question. The U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse recommends early identification, explicit and systematic intervention, progress monitoring and motivational supports for struggling Mathematics students. These ideas point toward something Guyana desperately needs: interventions deliberately designed for children who are already behind.

This is where one girl’s story becomes a national story. Our Mathematics problem does not suddenly appear at CSEC. We see warning signs in the early grades, again at Grade Six, at CSEC and eventually in the number of young people who fail to matriculate and leave school without the academic foundation required for further study or many forms of employment. In datasets I have reviewed over several years, Mathematics performance often appears to separate into two large groups: a substantial population struggling badly and another group doing reasonably well, with a much smaller group performing exceptionally.

Yet much of our national conversation focuses on the exceptional group. We celebrate the top NGSA students, children earning extraordinary numbers of CSEC subjects, Mathematics camps, STEM centres and competitions. All of these have value, but they address a different problem. Guyana absolutely needs opportunities that push our strongest students beyond the curriculum. But the much harder national challenge is moving the child with 12% to 30%, then to 40%, then across the pass line and onward.

Achieving the national improvement, we seek will mean meaningful collaboration at the national level and an openness from the Ministry of Education under Minister Sonia Parag, Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain and the wider education leadership. I hope that collaboration happens. Guyana is also seeing substantial new investment in STEM, including ExxonMobil Guyana’s announced US$100 million, 10-year initiative involving teacher development, student opportunities and career pathways. That investment could be significant, but even US$100 million cannot substitute for a clear national strategy focused on the struggling child. If interventions mostly reach children who are already performing reasonably well, good students will become better students while the bottom of the academic distribution barely moves. The real measure of transformation is whether the child who was failing begins to pass.

Guyana is developing rapidly, and industries that barely existed here a generation ago will employ thousands of Guyanese over the coming decades. Our Indigenous young people must be equipped to lead development in their communities and across the hinterland, just as our riverine, rural and coastal children must be prepared to become the engineers, technicians, scientists, teachers, entrepreneurs and skilled professionals building their regions. Every child deserves the opportunity to be prepared to earn a decent living in this rapidly changing economy.

Parents and guardians, particularly those responsible for struggling learners, cannot simply wait and hope that another school term will repair years of accumulated academic weakness. If your child is struggling, intervene. Use Pathway if it works for your family. Use another programme if it is better suited to your child. Find the teacher who can help. Ask questions. Check the books and report cards. Monitor the progress. Pathway offers a sliding scale for children from vulnerable families because the opportunity to recover academically should never belong only to children whose parents can afford expensive private lessons.

But the most important lesson from our learner is not simply that she moved from 12% to 60% in Mathematics. It is that 12% did not define her ability. Somewhere along the way, she had fallen behind, and eventually she became the child sitting quietly in lessons, ashamed to admit that she did not understand. Guyana has thousands of children like her, and we cannot look at them and conclude that they cannot learn.

The harder test of our education system is what we do with those children. Can we find them early enough? Can we understand why they are struggling and intervene before embarrassment becomes resignation? Can we move them from failing to passing and eventually toward believing that they have a future? Perhaps, instead of asking, “What is wrong with these children?” we should be asking, “What must we change so that they can succeed?”

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• crisis, Karen Abrams, Learner, mathematics, Mathematics grade

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