Of the few new ministerial appointments and portfolio reassignments that have occurred under the Ramotar administration, those of Ministers Robert Persaud and Priya Manickchand are probably the most significant. Minister Persaud has been tasked with giving shape and substance to the newly created Ministry of Natural Resources. That ministry clusters the country’s natural resources – gold, diamonds, forest resources and, it would seem, eventually, oil – under a single administrative umbrella. Perhaps more significantly it brings those resources under closer state control and that of course becomes a matter of major significance when account is taken of the fact that the country’s mineral resources may very well become its economic bulwark in the period ahead. Minister Persaud’s new assignment, it would seem, points to his own ascendancy in the ruling party’s political pecking order.
Minister Manickchand’s case is different. It would appear that having given satisfactory service in her earlier portfolio she is deemed to be ready for a tougher assignment. Her task, one assumes, is at least to begin to right the ship, the HMS Education, which, for years, has been listing dangerously. If Minister Persaud’s task is to create the paradigms of a new portfolio – even though it has to be said that the sub-sectors within that portfolio are not without their own separate challenges – Minister Manickchand’s appears to be the much more onerous one, contextually, bearing a striking resemblance to one of the Twelve Labours of the Greek mythological figure Hercules.
Whatever goals the new Minister sets herself, our expectations of her must be set in the context of the condition of crisis that currently afflicts the education sector. Her previous portfolio certainly had its challenges and there were times when she responded to those challenges with what appeared to be the exuberance of her youthfulness and a sense of self-confidence that was sometimes lacking many of her Cabinet colleagues. If, however, her earlier portfolio provided her with an opportunity to demonstrate that she was capable of functioning as a Minister, her elevation provides an infinitely sterner test of her mettle. Why? Because simply put, correcting all of the problems the bedevil our education system is an accomplishment that that is probably beyond her and the best she can seek to do is to lay the firmest possible foundation for those to follow. If she can achieve even that she would have done an outstanding job.
Each minister brings a different style to bear in his or her portfolio management. Minister Manickchand’s predecessor appeared to favour what one might call a things are happening approach, employing eye-catching ‘projects’ that appeared to target some of the obvious fault lines in the education system, often proffering these initiatives as though they were, in themselves, solutions to the problems which they targeted. It turned out in some cases that some of them might have been ill-conceived, or perhaps might not have taken whole word account of considerations that would have had a critical bearing on their effective execution.
The no child left behind policy, apparently well thought of in some quarters, may well have been one such ‘project.’ The truth is that all it did was to enable the movement of underperforming children from one level to another, a physical shift that appeared to have less to do with whether those children really got ‘left behind’ or not and more to do with the need to move them on – so to speak – if those children following them were not to be discommoded. It is a good sign that the new Minister has said publicly that she is at least prepared to review it.
Over time, it appeared that the things are happening approach had become par for the course in the Ministry of Education, so that, for example, the pursuit of constructing new schools did not appear, in many cases, to take sufficient account of the attendant responsibility to provide the resources, notably trained and qualified teachers; nor, it now appears, did the implementation of the IDB-funded Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) initiative – which we are told has been tried with some measure of success elsewhere in the hemisphere – foresee the problems associated with the maintenance of recording sets (on which to air the programmnes to children) distributed to schools in the hinterland, electrical power problems associated with the durability of batteries used to power the sets and the logistical problems that are sometimes encountered in moving supporting printed and electronic material to remote regions. One might also cite as another example of the risky things are happening policy what appeared to have been the hasty launch of the high profile Education (TV) Channel in circumstances where current evidence suggests that, apparently, no serious effort had been made to address the issue of programming.
Arising out of this one is tempted to ask whether such projects ought not to have been subjected to more thorough analysis by the former Minister’s specialist advisors prior to implementation. Two issues arise here. The first has to do, perhaps, with the quality of advice from which the former Minister benefited. The second, of course, has to do with government’s proclivity for placing a higher value on the political or image-building impact of projects like those referred to earlier, than on the extent to which they actually serve their intended purpose. It is for this reason that such projects rarely if ever benefit from any objective post-implementation evaluation.
We will, in the fullness of time, come to learn more about Minister Manickchand’s style of management, though one must hope that it does not amount to the same things are happening approach that simply seeks to soak up the praise and publicity arising out of ‘projects’ attended by opening ceremonies littered with showers of praise and the cutting of ribbons but which, at the end the day, probably add rather less value to our education system than might have been expected from the size of the investments.
Minister Manickchand has come to the table with a weak hand and it would not hurt for her to spend time trying to get her mind around what one might call the basement problems, since whatever else we do, we are probably likely to end up on a siding to nowhere unless we give some measure of attention to those basement problems.
The Minister need not look far for those problems. Those that come to mind immediately are the seeming inability of the government to allocate sufficient financial resources to meet all of the requirements of free primary and secondary education or, perhaps, the misallocation of resources under the national budget; a condition of low morale among many teachers arising out of lower than deserved levels of pay and the attendant flight of skills; the failure of the education sector to attract the most qualified post-secondary and post-university personnel to the teaching profession on account of uncompetitive salary levels; the inability of the teacher training system, including the Cyril Potter College to produce sufficiently large numbers of sufficiently well-trained teachers to meet the needs of schools across the country; the serious scarcity of specialist teachers in some subject areas including foreign languages, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technology; the deplorable condition of many schools across the country and the impact of the attendant unacceptable physical environment on the effectiveness of education delivery; parent protests arising out of conditions in schools and the resulting decline in the quality of relations between parents and the education system; the relatively recent upsurge of serious violence in schools and the attendant considerable erosion of teacher authority.
These are by no means all of the ‘basement’ challenges that afflict the education system. They serve, however, to make the point, that approaches to fixing the structure as a whole are doomed to failure unless these problems are tackled and remedied to some reasonable degree. Whatever curriculum-related projects are implemented, for example, if there are not sufficient and sufficiently qualified and motivated teachers to execute them; if the physical environment in the school hampers effective delivery; if most of the teachers’ energies must be expended on ‘fire-fighting’ among feuding students; if teachers’ personal circumstances impact on their enthusiasm for the job and if parents are not fully embraced as partners in resolving problems, particularly those that have to do with the conduct of their children, then we may as well forget the more ambitious ‘projects’ since the most that they will do is to bring an altogether misleading sense of tidiness to the upper deck of the education system when, in fact, the basement is crumbling.
