Editorial: Please, Minister - no levelling down
published: Sunday | August 24, 2003

EDUCATION MINISTER, Mrs. Maxine Henry-Wilson, has revealed that she is mulling over the problem of primary school children who score best on the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) all going to a small number of 'elite' secondary schools while those students who score poorly in the GSAT exam are sent to other upgraded secondary schools.

She may be right in pointing out that this results in a de facto "elitism" but having diagnosed the illness we think she is quite wrong about the medicine she is thinking of administering, namely "scattering" the students with good results throughout the system rather than allowing them to go to the schools of their choice. Some of the language used by the minister in her comments carry ominous echoes of the "levelling down" theories of the '70s, a discredited ideology which we had hoped had been expunged from the political vocabulary.

We understand, of course, that the mother of a ghetto youth, herself barely literate, would support the minister for seeing to it that her son who had a passing grade on the GSAT exam would be assigned to a traditional secondary school uptown while another boy who did well in the GSAT exam would be compelled to attend the so-called upgraded secondary school in her vicinity. But how is this going to improve Jamaican education and why are we pandering to such political expediency? In fact, the student with a high GSAT score will only be frustrated in his new environment and unchallenged to keep up his grades. The student with a poor GSAT score, forced into a school where competition is stiff, is very likely to have his low self-esteem reinforced.

With respect, the minister is missing the point often made by Dr. Ralph Thompson and Mr. Peter Espeut in articles published in this newspaper, that if early childhood education is given the priority it deserves, the performance level of all students flowing into the primary school system will rise remarkably, resulting in GSAT scores becoming more uniform. Any inequality in the present system results from the inequality with which early childhood education is treated. Middle-class parents, in carrying out their parental responsibilities, can send their children to church prep schools and pay for private tutoring. Nothing is wrong with that! In the absence of the nuclear family structure in Jamaica, the state needs to take on this "parenting" responsibility for the children of the poor and disadvantaged. Only then will equality of opportunity be restored and education generally improved.

Bright children should not be penalised for being bright nor should prosperous parents be scorned for being prosperous. What the country needs is more brilliance and greater prosperity ­ not leveling down by the state in some misguided concept of egalitarianism. We urge the minister to think again.

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