The National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) results were released with the usual media frenzy that focused on the success of the top 1% of performers. Historically, this fixation arose out of the precursor to the NGSA — the “Common Entrance Exam” for primary school students — determining who was the lucky few who could enter the “premier secondary schools” in Georgetown. That this remains the raison d’etre for the hullabaloo is a telling indictment of the failure to bring secondary schools across the country to the level of the elite Georgetown public secondary schools.
Queen’s College was founded in the middle of the 19th century, and Bishops’ a bit later, to educate the sons and daughters of the elite. St Stanislaus, founded around the same time as Bishops’ by the rising Portuguese business class, demonstrated that private schools could also deliver quality education; while Berbice High School, founded in the early 20th century, showed that a school outside Georgetown could also do the same.
Even though a Minister of Education in the previous PPP Administration had accepted that there was a need to raise the standards in the rural secondary schools — and had committed to doing so — the fact that Berbice High School has dropped off the map as a “top” secondary school is indicative of the continued decline of the public school system, which began during the PNC’s first regime, between 1964 and 1992. Before then, Guyana’s schools could match any in the British Caribbean.
But the performances of private primary schools in the NGSA and private secondary schools at CSEC have showed conclusively that the failure to raise standards lies squarely with the inability of the Ministry of Education to properly administer the delivery of the curricula to the students of Guyana. After only a few years following the reversal of the policy of nationalisation of private schools, the latter are now dominating the NGSA top 1% and, indeed, overall. In the just-released NGSA results, there is only one public school student in the top 10 — actually ‘top 15”, because of “ties”. While the complete breakdown of the top 1% has not been released, a cursory examination suggests that the private schools would have exceeded last year’s 55% of those numbers.
Mathematics is regarded as the key subject in the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) which are now regarded as vital to the progress of undeveloped countries; in Guyana’s case, from the status of being “just above Haiti”, where it has been stuck from the last three decades. But the performance in Mathematics at NGSA has been abysmal. In 2010, just 34 per cent of pupils obtained a score of 50 per cent and more in Mathematics; in 2011, it increased to 38 per cent; in 2013, it increased again to an encouraging 43 per cent; but dropped significantly in 2014 to 31 per cent. In 2015, it rose to 38 percent; but in 2016, dropped even more precipitously to 14%. We are now told that this has miraculously shot up to 46 percent in 2017. The question is whether, like before, the gain is transitory.
While the Chief Education Officer (CEO) offered an “explanation” of this anomaly — a million Emergency Mathematical Intervention Plan — it just means we are more or less back to where we were in 2013. To wit, more than half of our children entering secondary school failed their graduating assessment in Mathematics.
But there is another troubling trend — a steady decrease in the number of children sitting the NGSA.
In 2013, we started with 16,811; in 2014 with 15,227; 2015 with 15,225; 2016 with 14,386, and this year, 2017, we started with just 13,329. While our population has remained more or less constant, has our birth rate and/or migration rate created what in effect would be an increasingly older population? If this extrapolation is correct, this will be another factor that would hinder our quest for development.
