That barometer of educational resources in our country – national media coverage of the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) results – once again confirmed the tremendous importance given to being accepted by the “top” secondary schools. These are all located in Georgetown, just as they were 50 years ago when we were granted independence. This elitism that is confined to the “city schools” is not coincidental.
The British launched Queen’s College and Bishops’ in Georgetown back in the mid 19th century to educate the scions of the expatriate and local upper class and Berbice High followed two decades later. The schools received whatever funding they desired from the public purse, filled from taxes on locals, who could not enter the schools. A County Scholarship Examination was later introduced, permitting a select few such as Sam Hinds, to enter the schools in the 20th century. When this was changed to the “Common Entrance” in the early 1960 under “internal self government” by the People’s Progressive Party, there was great celebration at the “opening up” of the elite schools.
However, even though several new secondary schools were constructed in rural areas, no one insisted these schools be equipped and staffed to match Queens and Bishops. It should not be surprising that more than 50 years later, the “top schools” are still in Georgetown and Berbice High has fallen to rural standards. While one of the Ministers of Education in the past Administration did commit to ensuring an equalisation of rural and urban schools, there have been no concrete plans even drafted to achieve it.
But the focus on the top one per cent hides another, just as debilitating defect in the educational system – the overall abysmal failure of the primary schools to even pass on the basic skills of reading and writing at a Grade Four level to the majority of the 14,000-16,000 children between the ages of 10 to 12 that write the Assessment annually. The main reason why this fact is not widely known is that the scores that are announced are not “Raw Scores” but “Standardised Scores” used simply to rank the students while disguising how abysmal is the overall performance.
So for instance, while the two top students this year tied at 568 marks and the last one in the top one per cent came in at 537, a child scoring 420 only scored about 50 per cent of the actual raw scores. This means that most of the children entering rural secondary schools with marks in the mid 400’s have a tremendous amount of remedial work that should be done with them if they are to get the best of a secondary school education. The children scoring in the bottom 20 percentile really ought to be held over, but this is never done.
As a matter of fact, in 2006, the Common Entrance Examination was changed to the NGSA – with the crucial emphasis on “Assessment” rather than “Examination” to assist in early remedial interventions in identified subject areas. The children would be “assessed” at Grades Two and Four, and the scores at these levels – respectively five per cent and 10 per cent would be added to the Grade Six marks achieved for a final score. The theory was the assessments would be used at each point to assist the teachers in the succeeding level to perform the necessary remedial work with the children. Presumably, this would also hold for children entering into Grade Seven of the secondary schools, since all of the latter are guaranteed places. These assessments were never used by teachers for their designated purpose.
This year, the scores for Grades Two and Four were not added into the final marking pool, so that the NGSA comes full circle back to the old Common Entrance Examination. Before the Ministry embarks on another threatened round of innovations – this time by the Caribbean Examination Council – it should consider raising the standards of all schools at the primary and secondary levels.
