Devising “pie in the sky” interventions to solve problems of poor performance in the education system

Recently, I walked by a primary school. On its walls painted in bright colours were numerals and letters of the alphabet. There were also a number of pithy sayings. One of these sayings was the motto of the Ministry of Education.,“Every child can learn: Every child must learn,” which stood out in sharp relief. Teachers, students, parents and the wider community – its stakeholders – were constantly being reminded of the core aim of the school. That is, to do everything possible to foster learning in every child. However, while I was admiring the works of art, the pithy sayings, the general environment of the school, I wondered about the extent to which any or all of the stakeholders were committed to this vision which the school was championing and the extent to which they were resourced to make this vision a reality.

It is no secret that there are many children who enter the education system at the pre-primary level, continue their schooling up to the end of the secondary level from which they graduate but without having acquired much competence in reading. As a matter of fact, these children leave school not much better off academically than when they entered. This is at least fourteen years, in some cases, where children have been exposed to a wide range of curricula but have not been positively impacted by them. The question that many persons are asking is: How did these students manage to transition from one stage to the next of the education system without possessing the necessary competencies to manage at subsequent stages?

The Ministry of Education has made a bid to arrest the problem of underperformance or lack of performance of some students in the education system. If students do not pass the Grade Four Literacy Test (GFLT) after four sittings they are put into the Alternative Secondary Transitional Programme (ASTEP). ASTEP was rolled out 2011 as part of the Ministry’s Competence-based Transition Policy (2009). According to the promotional rhetoric on the Ministry’s website, it expects that the students in ASTEP “will benefit from an alternative instructional pathway specifically”. This bit of promotional rhetoric goes on to attempt to convince us that “this strategy is designed to provide [these children] with the teaching and learning environment which will provide them with the necessary competencies for transition to the secondary level”. And, the Ministry assures us that these students will be assessed before they transition into secondary school.

To develop these competencies to aid in the transition of these students to secondary school a “special curriculum” spanning Language and Communication skills, Numeracy, Science and Social Studies, the Creative Arts, Physical Education and Personal Empowerment is offered to them. The programme lasts for two years with an additional year included for those who fail the assessment at the end of two years of the programme.

This is a new programme as it is only in its second year. However, if we ask the persons in the Ministry who are responsible for the management of this programme to tentatively assess how it is performing so far we would get responses that are noncommittal. But we would be assured that after a few kinks have been ironed out it should achieve its objectives. And we would be reminded that the success of the programme is dependent on the work of those people on the ground. That is, the teachers.

If we ask those who teach in the programme to assess the performance of the programme to date we would get a number of different perspectives because all of these teachers bring different resources to their job on the programme. An observer confides that in the first year of the programme those who taught, for the most part, came from outside the education system. Some were pre-trained teachers while others had degrees in reading, for example, but had no experience of teaching. These teachers had to be “mentored” by the “real” teachers in the system.

In one school piloting the programme, for reasons of logistics, a trained graduate is teaching on the programme. Her experience of teaching at the primary level has led her to conclude that her students are performing at the pre-primer and grade one level. And, from her background in counselling, she has observed that many, if not all, these students have behavioural problems. Furthermore, from her limited experience in administering diagnostic tests she has come to the conclusion that they all have difficulty learning.

So, if we attempt to further develop a tentative profile of these students from our observation as lay persons a number of things become evident. First, if the students targeted for the ASTEP have failed the GFLT four times, they would have been at least thirteen years old on entering the programme. However, I have learnt that the ages of students in this programme range from thirteen years to sixteen years. Second, if these students have failed the GFLT four times while other students in the same grade have been passing this means that the continuing failure of these students is as a result of a number of interrelated factors probably involving the psychological, social and economic and not just teacher incompetence.

However, teacher incompetence seems to be a major part of the formula that the Ministry has devised through ASTEP to solve the problem of poor performance of these students. This has to be if the teachers recruited to the programme, for the most part, do not possess the technical as well as the theoretical skills to make learning possible. Furthermore, according to the Ministry, “this strategy [ASTEP] is designed to provide [these children] with the teaching and learning environment which will provide them with the necessary competencies for transition to the secondary level”. However, the “teaching and learning environment” which is created for these students is not much different from that created for the other students who are mastering the primary school curricula. The major difference may be that of class size which is smaller for the students in ASTEP than for those in the regular grades.

Yet, the Ministry of Education expects that the class teacher, in spite of her/his competence or lack thereof (no training in teaching reading or special education or no training at all) should get these students mastering the ASTEP curriculum after two years. One teacher who teaches on this programme has to go back to the basics to try to give these students a foundation in the hope that learning will take place. She is teaching them phonics, the sounds that make up words, because many of these students had not developed an understanding of phonics from their earlier schooling. She is teaching them phonics in an attempt to get them to read so that they can grasp the curriculum. Many of these students have made very little progress to date so in order for them to perform creditably on their assessment after two years in the programme she is forced to teach to the test. Learning for these students, then, will still be elusive.

I am beginning to feel that politicians as well as policymakers are hung up on rhetoric. If you read the education policy documents that have been put out by the Ministry of Education, you may be fooled into unquestioningly accepting them. These documents are filled with nice sounding words which incorporate lofty goals. However, they do not quite capture the reality on the ground.

We should not totally blame the politicians for this state of affairs. As Michael Manley, former Prime Minister of Jamaica and author rightly or wrongly declared in a speech to civil servants in 1972 [it depends on one’s perspective] politicians were “conceptualisers”. They should therefore see themselves as “interpreters of the people’s dreams”. The civil servants, on the other hand, according to Manley, having experience and exposure to the practice of government have a role to bear in bringing this experience and exposure to the advice they give to the politicians as regards their conceptualisations.

Politicians today may still be “conceptualisers” but their conceptualisations have been allowed by their senior civil servants and advisors to remain in the land of conceptualisations. Conceptualisations require careful and systematic development and implementation if politicians and senior civil servants expect them to achieve their goals. And the environment in which these conceptualisations are systematically developed and implemented must be central to the deliberations. However, this is often not the case.

Are senior civil servants bringing their experience and exposure to the practice of government to bear on the advice that they give to Ministers? What is the nature of this experience and exposure? Is it that the senior civil servants and advisors properly advise the Minister on the pitfalls inherent in the approach to solve the particular problem that he wants solved but he ignores their advice because he realises that he only has five years to present “evidence” to the electorate that he deserves another term in office? Or, we can ask: On what grounds do these senior civil servants and advisors base their advice? Have they spent any time in the schools to get a first hand view of what happens there, a view that is culturally specific and one that they can measure against the ideas in the literature that they are perusing?

In trying to solve the problems in the education system politicians and policymakers need to be realistic. While they do not have an infinite amount of resources to craft comprehensive solutions to the problems, they need to be honest in their approach to solutions. Persons close to the ASTEP and its performance to date who have a modicum of intelligence know that the goals of the programme are only pipe dreams, not because they are not laudable but because the implementation of the programme is weak. Teachers are just going through the motions, doing the best they can, while waiting for the next programme to be rolled out.

The dream of the people as interpreted by the politicians that have passed through the Ministry of education seems to be every child can learn [and that] every child must learn. However, for this dream to come true senior civil servants and advisors need to forge a much closer relationship than the one that now exists with the practitioners in the schools – the teachers. These teachers can educate them about the phenomenon for which they are interested in devising solutions.