My dream school

Cro Cro’s 2000 calypso dream of Dole Chadee and his gallows mates'’ anticipation of attorney general Ramesh Maharaj joining them in hell, I once described as a “relentless chronicle of sexual violence…breath-taking for its satirical imaginativeness.”

I dreamt non-Cabinet Minister of Education Ministry Lovell Francis, two weeks ago, but my dream had only slight similarities. Unlike the PNM’s bad-driving cussbud Cepep calypsonian, in my dream I was Francis’s saviour, not his fantasy sadist torturer.

I told him about my dream the next day and promised that I’d share another dream I’ve shared with him — publicly in the column. Strangely, my literal dream happened the same day he debated the budget — although I hadn’t listened to it at all — when he was called to speak earlier than his turn and didn’t focus on his portfolio. My figurative dream is about ending the Secondary Education Assessment (SEA) exam. Perhaps that’s why I dreamt of rescuing him. He said he doesn’t have time to read me, so do call him and tell him what you think of the idea.

Every time I am forced to be on the roads during the morning rush, I think of the SEA. Especially those mornings when school is on holiday and I stream along the highway at a time when it is otherwise a snaking parking lot. But also, those mornings where Waze’s prediction of my arrival time keeps creeping further and further into the future. I wonder how much productivity the nation loses and how much mental health and quality of life students suffer because of the SEA.

If students went to good secondary schools close to where they lived and didn’t have to travel to good primary schools in order to get into the good secondary schools, the country’s transportation patterns — and costs — would be radically different. Perhaps parents would have far more time with their children to do the parenting the Prime Minister keeps wringing his hands about. If youngsters’ life opportunities weren’t so fundamentally ordered by a fallible half-day exam before age 11, perhaps we would avoid the disorder of social violence no one in political leadership seems to think is a direct product of clustering youngsters who start out with fewer chances in schools that give them even less.

Our education system, I wrote six years ago, is designed to make losers out of most of the children who pass through it.

My mother’s first assignment at educational management, with only the benefit of one of UWI’s first book-heavy in-service diplomas in education, was as afternoon-shift vice-principal of what is now Diego Martin North Secondary School. These “junior secs” (the pun was not long in coming) were a bad PNM experiment in expanding secondary education, poorly thought through and badly executed; and almost all have ended up, after their expansion into five-year schools, as the lowest-performing and least safe of the nation’s schools.

I’ve hinged my dream of ending the SEA on this one school in a practical way. It’s a place whose history I’m tied to, where I spent time as a child, smelled its unused classrooms. It’s a way of my family investing in something my mother cared about and devoted years to. It’s also my sense that we’ve made so few investments in training educational leaders that even someone with limited preparation, a few ideas and a good evaluator can make a difference in school management.

The dream I shared with Lovell is bigger. It hinges on how lots and lots of people like me who live in communities where these often-violent schools exist can own them and develop them into institutions they want their own children or their neighbours’ to attend. Parents. Families. But also, non-parents. Places they can volunteer skills to, from school maintenance to after-school activities to fundraising. Places they can make decisions together for, and make investments in.

My vision was a simple three-year pilot programme in a handful of similar schools, of building community ownership in a way that aims to develop them into model local institutions that provide unique value that denominational schools in Port of Spain or San Fernando can’t compete with. And providing robust ongoing evaluation of the results.

Admittedly, it won’t work without the right principal. But my idea seems so much more substantive than anything the other Minister of Education shared during the budget debate. I stopped reading the Hansard when I reached the point where he said he wanted no more staffing for the division that provides behavioural services to schools.

We’re so short of good ideas for education, for crime, or the schools that are supposed to produce the former instead of the latter, I think my simple idea deserves a chance to be tested.

One by one we can build community schools that put the SEA out of business. And transform economic life and mental health in the nation.