LIKE crime, the education system will constantly attract political attention. It is useless to say, “Don’t politicise crime,” or “Don’t politicise education.” Both are not only related but have critical effects on the society’s social, psychological and economic welfare.
Both are inherently political, for three major reasons: (1) Each costs taxpayers billions of dollars. (2) Public safety and educational equity depend heavily on the success or failure of government’s policies. (3) Under the Constitution and relevant laws, political accountability for both crime and education is compulsory, making it necessary for civil society to keep a close watch over ministers and government.
The irony is that the politicians, over the years, have treated both with more quickened political expediency than with thoughtful policies for long-term benefit. More precisely, both crime and education operate within legal frameworks that are unfit for purpose. So even with good intentions, ministers will remain disabled, constrained.
The political contestations between former education minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly and Education Minister Dr Michael Dowlath over the education system today, especially over examination failures, school repairs, inequity, school-type differences, etc, are nothing new.
What’s happening today flows from yesterday’s management and policies.
Check the newspapers throughout the 1980s.
Former education minister Overand Padmore had a busy time. Educator Dr Charles V Gocking then challenged the curriculum for being “too grammatical,” causing students with different aptitudes to “fail.”
The PNM, with international assistance, pursued educational expansion by adding government composite secondary and junior secondary schools, with a shift system which was severely criticised by the Moses Report.
Then, under Basdeo Panday’s 1995 UNC government, education minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar hurriedly gave every primary-school graduate a secondary-school place – to face a straitjacket curriculum which Dr Gocking had criticised. However, parents were happy.
I briefly recall all this to emphasise what, as a newspaper columnist then, I repeatedly explained: that expanding the quantity of school places without ensuring quality education carries serious unintended consequences. Student delinquency started to increase, to a point of no return.
Today we have the National Training Agency to treat with the non-grammar-school student type. This agency’s success is yet to be properly evaluated.
So the recycling continues, leaving the population again hoping for improvement in examination passes, equity, school management and student behaviour and character.
When I served as a member of the Teaching Service Commission, some 12 years ago, I was appalled at the disturbing levels of teacher absenteeism, delayed disciplinary hearings, appointments, teachers’ complaints, etc, and the remarkable differences between most denominational and governments schools. Many schools faced disaster.
That experience and my subsequent research strongly suggested that the issue was not necessarily whether a school was Hindu, Muslim, Presbyterian, Methodist, Vedic, Baptist or government-run. A successful, high-achieving school was mainly about school management, leadership, oversight, close-up accountability, parental support and expeditious response by the Ministry of Education.
While political contentions exist between the government-assisted denominational schools and government schools, the ethnic and social class inequity is further deepened by the fact that many well-to-do parents send their children to private schools with seamless links to higher educational institutions abroad.
It has also been found that SEA results from such private schools are proportionally higher than even the high-performing denominational schools.
However, the frequent political controversies over educational imbalance in ethnicity, social class and gender were generally hit-and-miss allegations without reliable data foundation. How, then, could a government generate policies to start remedying these widespread equity concerns?
Therefore, as an independent senator and social scientist, I encouraged the NAR government to take remedial action. I successfully moved an education-reform motion in Parliament in March 1988.
The edited version: “Whereas the educational system has undergone extensive physical expansion since 1975 but without any systematic evaluation of the quality of education or the degree to which the gap between economically disadvantaged and economically advantaged students has been closed,
“Be it resolved that government undertake a nationwide study of all schools to determine the differences in Common Entrance and secondary-school examinations and year-one student intake at UWI according to social class, family type, sex, religion, residence…”
The next PM, Patrick Manning, established the Centre for Ethnic Studies, which implemented that senate motion. The authors, Drs Selwyn Ryan and John La Guerre, found some sensational results, one of which was that the most academically disadvantaged was the black female student.
Almost all those problems remain the same today, without effective remedy. Hence education remains “politicised.”
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