Let’s decolonialise, restructure educational design in Guyana and run fast with a reform agenda

Dear Editor,
Now that the World Bank’s Country Director for the Caribbean and current Caricom Chair, Barbados Prime Minister Mottley, have broken the ice that the Caribbean Region and Caricom are in a deep educational crisis, we can stop pretending that everything is honky dory in education.
I like Mottley’s “Alcoholics Anonymous” approach, where the first step to healing is you have to admit you have a problem. Once we are not pretending, not substituting propaganda for real progress, and we face the inconvenient truths, we can begin to restructure and reinvent our education system to give all our students, especially the dispossessed rural students, a fighting chance to be successful in life.
We are in a deep crisis, and I don’t see the calibre of educational leadership that is reform-minded; who reads widely, and who follows current educational research to take us out of our deep mess. Most people in educational leadership are top-down “status quo” preservers, who are change-resistant and need to be replaced or fired up.
While Caricom assembles a Task Force to address this urgent issue, we in Guyana can blaze the trails of excellence and show Caricom how to do it. President Ali has positioned Guyana in such a way that all our neighbours are looking to see what we are doing. So, we must not fail to lead.
Reforms to move education forward might require some Trump-Musk-like approaches, where heads roll and where we “kick ass and take names,” as author Paul Allen Payne would say. It’s time for some “disruptive innovation.” (as change theorist Clayton Christensen would call it).
The Vice President had asked what is our “return on investment” in education for all the money we are putting into it. Our Minister of Education has asked that too. So, we must now begin to dismantle old, unworkable, irrelevant structures and replace them with a new educational design, matching twenty-first century needs and serving our new oil economy with a relevant education system.
When such high percentages of students are failing the NGSA and are being condemned to poor-quality schools; while the academically-gifted go to six top schools; while the matriculation rate (students passing five or more subjects including Math and English) is abysmally low, with no light at the end of the tunnel on how we can fix that; it cannot be business as usual.
As the World Bank indicated, we are in a state of emergency in education. And desperate times call for desperate measures. True, Guyana has made enormous strides under the Ali administration – most schools built, most teachers trained, and other such inputs into education. But the essential question is: “Where is the bang for the buck?” (as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defence, Charles Erwin Wilson, would ask). What’s new, different, and better in education performance, education management, and the modernisation of our education systems? Results matter, and ongoing failure is not an option.
The system now has almost no accountability, and is an excuse factory for why we fail. Poor, archaic practices in curriculum, instruction and assessments need a tsunami of change. The way we select school leaders need to be abandoned in favour of a new merit-based system founded on the candidate’s potential for excellence, not the colonial “Methuselah” principle of age as a teacher and entitlement to promotion.
There are too many clueless square pegs in round holes leading our schools, and it is a root cause for the education crisis. Rise up Guyana! Lead the way in Caricom!

Sincerely,
Dr Jerry Jailall
Civil Society Advocate