No child left behind policy revoked in 2013 but still being used

…policy doing more harm than good in schools – GTU General Secretary

The Automatic Promotion Policy (APP) dubbed the “no child left behind policy” has now become an obstruction to delivering quality education to children in the classroom since they are no longer motivated to excel at their studies.
This is according to General Secretary of the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) Coretta McDonald, who told Guyana Times that this policy is affecting the progress at schools.
She explained that while this policy was created with the intention of helping the education system in Guyana, years later, it is having negative effects.
“For example, some children no longer attempt to or even want to complete their assignments to hand in to teachers so that they can be graded. They are not pushing themselves to excel or not even studying for exams as they should be. They know that the no child left behind policy equates to no repetition in the year they are in so they are not trying to do as much as they should because automatically, they will be put over to the next level,” the GTU General Secretary stated.
McDonald added that such behaviour by some children in the schools is also having an effect on students who actually want to achieve the highest marks at examinations.
Their drive for competition in academia can be adversely affected when they observe their classmates not performing well at school but everyone still being promoted, she noted.
According to the GTU General Secretary, the Government needs to either review the Automatic Promotion Policy and revamp it or abolish it from the education system in Guyana.
When it was introduced into the school system, the then leading opposition party, the People’s National Congress/Reform (PNC/R) had repeatedly condemned the former Administration for this move and heavily criticised such an initiative. However, although it had been announced by the PPP that the APP was revoked, the APNU/AFC Government is still implementing this policy, the same policy it was objecting to under the PPP Government.

Revocation
In July 2013, the then Education Minister Priya Manickchand announced that the Education Ministry revoked the policy since it had been rejected by parents and had a poor response to remedial classes.
Manickchand at that time said that students who perform poorly in Mathematics and English would not be promoted to the next class. The APP system is only in secondary schools.
According to Manickchand, students would be required to achieve close to the overall pass-mark set by the school with at least five CXC subjects with Grades 1 to 3. The decision to revise the Automatic Promotion Policy (APP) followed countrywide consultations at 30 meetings that were held as part of the planned review after two years.
“Reports from the consultations revealed that the policy is not popular with any of the critical stakeholders. Parents, teachers and even students themselves believe that the promotion from one grade to another should not be automatic,” the former Education Minister had stated.