Replacing the SEA: A solution

A statement endorsed by: Dr Ryan Allard, John Arnold, Shaun Biggart-Hutchinson, Laureen Burris-Phillip, Winston Dillon, Reginald Dumas, Dr Ralph Henry, Dr Vanus James, Dr Winford James, Raphael Jones, Kenneth Lewis, Prof Theodore Lewis, Dr Godfrey Martin, Prof James Millette, Joann Neaves, Aiyegoro Ome, Mervyn O’Neil, Reginald Phillips, Rodney Piggott, Zena Ramatali, Anselm Richards, Latoyaa Roberts, Gladstone Solomon, Maureen Taylor-Ryan

EVER SINCE investment in human capital became accepted as a critical way to think about education, countries across the globe have understood that schools serve not just a social function but an economic one. The Asian countries were the first to understand the new thinking and were the first to demonstrate that investment in education was central to moving from underdeveloped status to developed. Singapore and South Korea are outstanding examples of this philosophy.

In 2015 our students participated in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) with 69 other countries. PISA tests children at age 15 (about fourth form), in reading, mathematics and science. The average standardised score in science across all participating countries was 493. The top five countries were Singapore (556), Japan (538), Estonia (534), Taiwan (532), and Finland (531). TT averaged 425, placing 52nd.

We placed 49th in mathematics, and 50th in reading.

Singapore was first in all three subjects. Finland, Canada, and Japan were among the top ten in all three.

In our country, science, for reasons that escape us, is not viewed as important at the elementary level. It is not tested at the SEA, and hence schools do not bother with it.

This lack of focus on science in the elementary school helps make us a mediocre country. Science, especially in the world we live and will be living in, should be at the core of the elementary school curriculum.

In the meantime, our school system keeps going back to colonial inheritances in education. In 1960, before we had a constitution, or were independent, we made the Concordat compromise, a political arrangement.

It is a bad omen in a country when its education system looks backward for justification. We offer children second and third choices of school. Even in America, where racial segregation was a major feature of education, schools are now guided by the Every Student Succeeds Act, the idea of Barack Obama.

We are now nearly in 2021. We are not guided any more by 1960 rules in hospital care, water distribution, electricity distribution, or road systems. In 1960 we got water from standpipes. Ice was delivered by trucks. Refrigerators in homes were scarce. There was no television. There were very few telephones.

But small children today are using cell phones, and many have iPads.

Why should our education system remain stuck in 1960? Sixty years later, is that the kind of development we want for TT?

The idea of an exam at 12 comes from the English model known as Common Entrance, introduced in the UK in 1904. That exam was abolished there in 1976 and replaced with the comprehensive school system. Children in the UK do not have to compete for a secondary school place. The transition there from elementary to secondary is non-eventful. The 90 per cent of children who attend comprehensives are assigned a secondary school by the local education authority, mainly based on residence. These schools take children to A-Levels.

In Canada, children simply move on from elementary to secondary school as a rite of passage. They do not have to compete for placement in schools. As seen above, children from Canadian schools are world class.

In Finland, education is compulsory from age seven to 16, beyond which there is upper secondary schooling. A 12-year-old child in Finland is not made to suffer the kind of trauma to which children from depressed communities here are subjected.

Our group condemns the idea of second- and third-choice schools, which are by definition inferior.

As Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said recently, the SEA creates winners and losers at age 12. It condemns 70 per cent of children to schools that are inferior and, worse, to aimlessness, and many to prison or CEPEP. The former chief education officer, Harrilal Seecharan, has now publicly bemoaned this societal inequity, which serves only to retard our country’s development. He wonders “whether in fact the SEA is serving our needs in terms of the outcomes…”

Why should there not be good schools for all our children, as is their right as citizens? Why, for example, should children in Tobago, which lags behind Trinidad, have to compete among themselves for a secondary school place? Is there no other way to do this? Must neighbour continue to compete against neighbour? Village against village?

Section 76 (1) of the Education Act states the following: “at any age between five and 16 years…a person shall be deemed to be of compulsory school age if he has attained the age of five years and has not attained the age of 16 years…”

Critically, section 7 of the act, which deals with “Prohibition of Discrimination,” states the following: “No person shall be refused admission to any public school on account of the religious persuasion, race, social status, or language of such person or of his parent.”

And section 4 of the Constitution, the supreme law of TT, enshrines “the right of a parent or guardian to provide a school of his own choice for the education of his child or ward.” Is the 1960 Concordat in consonance with all these legal requirements?

We do not offer the citizenry second-choice and third-choice water or hospital care. Why do we do this in the crucial area of education?

Solution

We believe that the SEA should be scrapped, and the remedy is that when a child in this country completes elementary school, he/she should go on to a good, high-quality secondary school, preferably at the choosing of parents, in conjunction with education authorities.

We believe that a sunset date should be set for the SEA that will allow the Ministry of Education and its partners, especially the universities, along with citizens, time to make the many adjustments needed to meet the new post-SEA demands of the system. The main demand is that these schools be of high quality and high expectations.

Science teaching should extend to all secondary schools, and A-Level education in all subject areas should be made widely accessible to children in both islands.

That sunset date should be the end of the 2021/2022 school year.

Our schools are due for qualitative overhaul at all levels. The overhaul should begin at the pre-school level. We have an excellent stock of state pre-schools. Parents should be encouraged strongly to make pre-schooling a must for their children. In both islands.

Great emphasis should be placed on early reading. A benchmark of age five should be set as a target by which parents should expect their children to be reading.

Elementary and secondary schools should all undergo qualitative overhaul. Widespread quality overhaul efforts should be made in both islands.

When the new school year begins in September 2022, the SEA should be no more. All schools, pre-schools, elementary and secondary, should be ready to deliver high-quality education, and structures and systems should be in place to make them accountable.

In the elementary school, children should be tested at every grade level to see if they meet quality standards, especially in reading and mathematics. Science should be a fixture in the curriculum.

Incentives should be put in place to reward schools and teachers for excellence.

We believe that this is what democracy dictates. Here every creed and race and social class and community and region must find an equal and an equitable place.