Lifting quality of the education discussion

DR ROLAND G BAPTISTE

A PUBLIC discussion on education has been taking place over the past few weeks, and here I propose to put more facts into the discussion with the objective of lifting its quality. In doing this I will not address this or that point made by others. Also, my focus will be on elementary schools.

The archdiocese of Port-of-Spain, through the Catholic Education Board of Management (CEBM), is responsible for 118 primary schools spread across TT. In some areas the Catholic school is the only one in the village. It shares this responsibility with the Ministry of Education and the Teaching Service Commission.

The performance of these schools can be placed in the typical bell curve. Some schools are preforming very well, some are middling, and some are under-performing.

Performance may be assessed in several ways. One is academic performance, and some may argue this is by far the most important. (As an aside, I left St Mary’s College many years ago, and I believe at this time of my life that the most important aspect of my education there was the system of values the school left with me. But that is another discussion). In this article I will focus on academic performance.

Academic performance of primary schools may be determined by the performance of their students in the SEA examinations. Another method, which was used by the Ministry of Education up until 2016, is the National Test.

This is a more comprehensive assessment because it assesses student performance in the three middle classes. As a result of this assessment, it was possible to place schools in four categories: excelling, mostly effective, academic watch, and academic emergency. I will use this latter assessment in this discussion.

At the CEBM, we assessed our schools using the findings of the National Test over the period 2006-2016. These are the facts.

In the Port-of-Spain area we have some of our better performing schools (one excels consistently), and at the same time some of our worst performing schools.

The ethnic composition of the students is the same in both cases. However, these two groups of schools are clustered in different geographic locations, suggesting that ethnic composition is not the issue.

In St George East one finds another matter of interest. St Joseph and Tunapuna are in the middle of the east-west corridor. We find in both towns that the girl schools consistently perform close to “excelling,” while the boys are consistently middling.

Lest this might point to the gender issue, we must be careful, because all three schools in the Arima area perform very well.

Victoria has been raised in the public discussion. What about the Catholic schools there? One Catholic school consistently excels, and almost all the others perform very well or close to “excelling.”

The ethnic composition of the students in schools in the geographic locations discussed above is predominantly African.

What about the schools that are consistently poor performers? There are approximately 27 such Catholic schools. Half of these are in Port-of-Spain and the environs; the others are spread across the country.

We have undertaken a project to raise the standard of these schools, and if SEA results are anything to judge by, we are seeing some improvement in some schools.

It must be noted that none of these 27 are in Tobago. Both Catholic schools in Tobago are mostly effective.

To conclude, when one uses the racial lens to explain performance in our schools, we are likely to get a distorted picture. Clearly, we must turn to the professional educators to provide explanations, based on rigorous and valid research.

Dr Roland G Baptiste is the chairman of CEBM