President of TTUTA Devanand Sinanan had hard words for denominational schools in T&T in an interview with the Guardian recently.
"I am not afraid to say that religious bodies are the ones who benefit most from the status quo," Mr Sinanan charged, "If you take away schools from the denominational boards the churches will collapse."
Whether such tough words have any basis in reality or not, there is clearly need to clarify the situation regarding the status of the SEA examination which remains both contentious and opaque.
At a luncheon for the top 2014 SEA students four weeks ago, Minister of Education Dr Tim Gopeesingh claimed that while he wanted to dispense with the examination, his call for recommendations from stakeholders and the national community had not been heeded.
Mr Sinanan dismissed that claim bluntly.
"That simply is not true," the TTUTA head said. National Parent Teachers Association president Zena Ramatali reminded the minister that the association was on record as recommending that the examination be dropped a decade ago.
President of the National Primary Schools Principals Association Vallence Rambharat has also described the SEA as a burden on everyone participating in it.
Mr Sinanan pointed out that the original purpose of the examination is now moot. With universal education in place there is no longer a need to select a few to move on to secondary education, and he is concerned that the examination now serves as a way of stratifying students and perhaps perpetuating class differences.
The alternative is not an examination at all. The Continuous Assessment Component serves to measure not just student performance but also the quality of education at the primary school level. In a perfect execution of this new process, all students and schools would be continuously evaluated on the quality of their literacy and numeracy training and learning. They will also be monitoring student aptitudes across a range of potential disciplines, including creative writing, visual and performing arts, while providing a uniform grounding in the essentials of ethics and morals.
At the secondary school level, education options could be tailored to create distinct paths for student with specific capabilities which would move them forward with both a grounding in language arts and mathematics, and a clear sense of their individual strengths and talents.
It would, in short, be a fundamental change from the status quo, which seeks to shoehorn students of widely varying skill sets and capabilities into a cookie cutter system meant to produce a uniform student profile.
Such a change is both ambitious and likely to be costly in terms of recasting school curricula, training teachers, and developing supporting infrastructure capable of meeting such bold changes.
The issue is not whether the SEA should go, but how committed the Ministry of Education is to making the kind of quantum leap that's necessary to embrace that catchphrase that arises in so many of the Education Minister's speeches, the nebulous and still poorly defined concept of 21st Century education.