Dear Editor,
From 2000-2005, I attended the Leonora Primary School on the West Coast of Demerara. For many years, the school was an academic juggernaut, sending dozens of students annually to the top four high schools in the country. For that reason, the school attracted students from all over Region 3. When the Grade Six instructor – and my beloved former teacher – behind the prolific results, Mrs Latchmin Gopal, had to depart under the Ministry of Education’s mandatory retirement rule, the overwhelming demand by parents for her to continue in the profession led to her opening a private institution of her own in her home village of Cornelia Ida. Last year, her school, the Academy of Excellence, had the second highest number of students – seventeen – in the top 1% of candidates who took the National Grade Six Assessment.
Because of limited resources, there is a sort of triage that takes place when resources are allocated to the country’s high schools: at the age of ten, students are tested and classified by academic ability and the highest achievers awarded slots at the top schools, which receive a disproportionate share of financial resources and their pick of the cream of the crop from the academic and training institutions. For this reason, the competition for a place in the top schools is fierce.
Not all public schools are created equal. The saying, what if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a child who cannot afford an education, can be extended to, what if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a child who cannot access quality education.
It is into this breach that private schools step. One iteration of the National Development Strategy, states that “by permitting private schools to emerge and absorb part of the student population in a self-financing way, the resources available to the public system will yield higher levels of support per student.” Private schools were regarded as critical components of the mission to educate our nation’s children. The decision by the government, therefore, to levy a 14% Value Added Tax – the Brain Tax – on tuition charged by private schools runs counter to this goal.
Editor, it would appear that the government assumes that the majority of students of private schools, who themselves make up only a minority of the overall student population of Guyana, are well off. I am originally from Anna Catherina, a rural hamlet in Region 3.
In the neighbouring village of Cornelia Ida, there is the Saraswati Vidya Niketan (SVN) private religious school, administered and financed by members of the Hindu religious group. My cousin attended this school. He had originally qualified for one of the two top high schools, but because of the distance from his home and because his parents thought he would benefit from closer parental supervision, he was sent to SVN, which would allow him to walk home for lunch and save on transportation costs. My uncle and aunt are not wealthy people.
He is a mechanic and she is a homemaker who owns a minibus. They do not take fancy trips to New York and Aruba; they have never owned a car. In my street, I know of two children who attend the Academy of Excellence. These children live with extended family members in a small wooden house, and were often ferried to school on a bicycle by their grandmother, who has since passed.
Education is what economists would call an inelastic good, and the tax burden will be passed on to the consumers (students). The Brain Tax, therefore, would hit working class parents hardest and reinforce inequality. This tax says, only rich kids should have the option of going to a school of their choice.
This Brain Tax on tuition paid for private education should terrify the entire country. Private education also includes the ‘bottom house’ extra lessons run by many public school teachers. If the government decides to regularize this sector and bring it into the formal economy, the Brain Tax would fall on almost every student in Guyana, because almost every one of them at some point takes lessons to supplement their formal schooling.
Economists also regard education as a public good, that is a good that benefits society as well as the consumer. Among the students attending private institutions are young professionals, such as the aspiring accountants and business executives, who attend schools such as the Accountancy Training Centre and Cacique. Many of these young adults are recent high school graduates who cannot afford to go to the University of Guyana full time, and need a flexible work-study schedule. They work, scrimp, save, and pay their own way through school.
It strains reason, then, to ask why the government would tax this public good and discourage these kids from investing in valuable human capital in a country already short of it.
Even as the Brain Tax makes little sense economically, it is not clear that this tax is even constitutional. Article 27(1) of the Constitution of Guyana enshrines access to education as a right, and while a tax on the profits and incomes of for-profit schools and educators is fair game, a tax on the consumption of education is an infringement of that right. Further, as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Guyana committed itself to guaranteeing access to quality education.
Editor, this Brain Tax is not a matter of education policy. If it is, let the government make that argument and defend it by way of empirical evidence. Otherwise, the Brain Tax is just another way for a revenue-hungry self-serving government to bleed the pockets of the Guyanese people.
Yours faithfully,
Saieed I Khalil
