If nothing else, in our condition, secondary school placements based on the single Grade 6 assessment (NGSA), like its predecessor the Secondary School Secondary Examination (SSEE), will do nothing to aid stakeholder participation and thus will be anti-working class. That is why it is difficult to believe, given the lineage of the parties making up the coalition government, that sufficient thought was given to what is being proposed.
Before proceeding to my main concern, because they have been in the public domain for some considerable time and also work against the interest of working people, I will most briefly deal with two of the usual quarrels with the SSEE.
The first states that it is unfair to allow the consequences of a single examination to determine an individual’s life chances. It could spell disaster if for any reason a child is not at her best at that one time. It appeared much fairer to spread the examinations over the entire course of the primary cycle and give stakeholders the opportunity to rectify discernible weaknesses.
The second has to do with the consequences attendant upon the tendency of primary schools to subjectively determine who were the brightest students and prime them for the SSEE, largely neglecting the rest. (Ishmael, Odeen (2012) The transition of Guyanese education in the twentieth century. GNI Publication, Georgetown).
Those issues aside, I concluded `Dismantling the secondary school placement system’ (SN 13/4/2016) with the following quote: “We expect that this system will provide an additional incentive and focus for school managers, parents and teachers to seriously come on board much earlier than they now do. … The point here is not about assessment methods alone, but the importance of thinking through all the potential impacts of this reform…”
So what were the incentive, focus and potential impacts of which we spoke when the SSEE was being reformed?
Today, education provision is not judged by how much is spent but on the quantity and quality of the output – the final product. The two are very interrelated: in a very real sense, you get what you pay for. I have repeatedly argued in this column that looked at from this standpoint, Guyana’s education system is not as ineffective as some would have us believe. Indeed, the better results coming from the private school sector, which, for the most part, contain the same students, demonstrates in no uncertain terms the link between available resources and the quality of output.
The problem with most critics is that they imagine some ideal type (an education system where every child leaving a given level is able to meet the national or international standards of that level) and want to judge what is taking place in Guyana against those standards, forgetting the comparatively meagre resources available to the system. Such criticisms are only legitimate from an inspirational standpoint.
Furthermore, education provision is perhaps the most integrated of all governmental provisioning. It is true that at the most basic levels all social provisioning is related in some, even if distant, manner. Yet unlike the provision of health services, where it is possible to discretely deliver to the population good vector control or cancer treatment in spite of terrible results in maternal and infant mortality, at the compulsory levels of education this is near impossible.
Here, the provisioning is totally integrated: all hands must be on deck to transform the raw materials coming in at ages two or three into the product you require at ages sixteen or eighteen.
That said, my own observations tell me that regardless of the level of inputs at least three factors are most important if one is to optimize available resources and thus provide the best possible product. These factors in order of priority are school management, teacher quality and commitment and parental/stakeholder involvement.
System managers need to provide and manage a modern cohesive vision, which, if properly embedded, will help to inform and drive the interventions of all stakeholders. That said, even in the absence of such a vision, good school and teacher management do produce remarkable results. We have seen that the most successful school systems have motivated and highly qualified teachers and it is now old hat that parental involvement and concern with the education of their children are central to student success (Future Notes 1-15/07/2015).
The question is, what can we do to enhance the contributions of all these factors?
Universally perhaps but certainly in Guyana, the vast majority of parents, even those who paid little attention to their children during most of their school lives, want them to do well at the final grade six examinations, i.e. want them to get a good school. It is also well known that although at the kindergarten stage parents tend to be very mindful of what is happening at the school, but generally interest wanes by the middle grades of primary and peters out at the higher levels as children start to develop their own personalities and become more difficult to manage.
If, then, the vast majority of parents want their children to get a good secondary place at the end of the primary cycle but tend to lose interest before then, what are the factors that could help to hold the interest of not only parents but teachers, schools, school boards, etc. throughout the school life of the child? Periodic consequential assessment is the single most important of these factors. For, as I argued last week, assessments without consequences will not lead to change, and change in stakeholder behaviour is what is essential if the school system is to improve.
But who is likely to suffer more if no or only weak exhortatory efforts are made to enhance parental participation? Certainly not the middle class, who are in that class precisely because they have for the most part imbibed an education dependent culture and have the resources to fulfill their ambitions.
It is working class people, many of whom live in fractured homes and poor conditions and hardly have enough time to eke out a living much less be involved in a lengthy and apparently meaningless process, who will suffer the most. Periodic consequential assessments, properly supported by the school system, can help to hold the interest of all stakeholders by providing a meaningful factor around which they can group to reflect upon, work towards and celebrate the results.
To remove this feature after a decade without any proper explanation of why it is no longer necessary and what, if anything, will take its place is highly irresponsible and most likely will be consequential.
