Perhaps anticipating that any critique of T&T's education system would be seen an admission of failure, Prime Minister Keith Rowley described fundamental shortcomings as a recent development.
Speaking at the National Consultation on Education last Monday, Dr Rowley described himself as "a person who has benefited from serious public policy in education" and asserted that "education has changed the lives of every family of this country."
But the deficiencies in schooling that have made underperformers of the majority of T&T's students stretch back to the 1970s when the government succumbed to "edifice complex," wherein building more schools was considered equivalent to improving education.
This also allowed officialdom to claim a 98 per cent literacy rate which was measured solely by school attendance.However, more rigorous surveys conducted in the 1990s found that 20 per cent of the adult population was illiterate while only 25 per cent possessed the literacy levels required for a modern society.
This regression can be traced in part to the 1970s oil boom, which undermined the value that most citizens had placed on education as a tool for social mobility. After all, what was the point of getting a university degree when port workers with O-Levels made more than a teacher?
Similarly, the make-work programmes which began their existence as DEWD negated even the need for a Common Entrance pass among the working class, since a ten days didn't require any skills or knowledge.It is true that, even in the midst of such pedagogically pernicious policies, the prestige schools and individual students performed well academically.
However, this is usually the case with the middle-and upper-classes in most societies and the assumption that the denominational schools have an approach to teaching which is superior has yet to be tested empirically.
The fact is these schools benefit from getting the cream of academically gifted students so factors like better management or more committed teachers may or may not be relevant.This, then, is the culture which education reforms have to change and there is no need to re-invent the wheel since there are ample examples from other countries which have revamped their education systems.
Finland, for example, focused on teacher competence, ensuring all their teachers have at least a Master's Degree and have the skills and autonomy to create their own curriculum.In Japan, teams of teachers within schools regularly conduct experiments to test the most effective ways to impart specific knowledge to students, often writing up their results in monographs for other teachers to access nationwide.
Locally, it would be useful for the Education Ministry to conduct or commission research into schools that do well against the odds. The Chaguanas Government Primary School, for example, usually has students scoring in the top 200 of the SEA. Is this because of the cohort the school draws from in the area, inspired leadership or innovative teaching?
Or, at the secondary level, the Miracle Ministries Pentecostal High School founded by Pastor Winston Cuffie regularly claims to have a high CXC pass rate. If this school does so well with students who performed poorly at SEA, an audit should yield useful insights.
Other countries have revolutionised their education policies within a decade but they all did so with political commitment and stakeholder buy-in. There are lessons there for T&T.
