A COMPREHENSIVE high school in James Hill, Clarendon, is named in memory of Claude McKay, who was born in that parish in 1889.

The world knows that he was a distinguished man of letters. McKay was born in Jamaica, but emigrated to the United States. He was an influential figure in the so-called Harlem Renaissance, the literary movement in the United States of the 1920s that gave a new and critical voice to black writers. Claude McKay, too, was a significant political figure of the left, who spent time in Lenin's Russia, a remarkable recognition, at the time, for a black Jamaican.

In Jamaica, Claude McKay's best-known works are perhaps the novel Banana Bottom and the poem of resistance, 'If We Must Die'.

Claude McKay must be pained at how those who run that school and those who control education policy in Jamaica besmirch his memory.

Dismal academic performance

This past week, this newspaper published rankings of Jamaica's traditional high schools, upgraded high schools, of which Claude McKay is one, and technical high schools based on their performance in maths and English at the Caribbean Examinations Council's (CXC) secondary schools exams for 2006 and 2007.

Statistician and pollster Bill Johnson weighted the performance of schools, to determine a quality score, based on the percentage of students in the subjects at grades one, two or three, which are the recognised passing grades at CXC. A school achieves a maximum 100 if 100 per cent of its grade-11 cohort passed their maths and English exams with grade ones.

In maths, the quality score for Claude McKay Comprehensive High School is 1.1 out of 100. In English, the school did marginally better at 2.7.

But this is not the only school with a famous name that has so dismal an academic performance as to shame those whom they pretend to honour. In that sense, Claude McKay Comprehensive High stands as a metaphor for the rot in our education system.

Robert Lightbourne, a man of fine intellect and refinement, who served in the Jamaican Cabinet in the 1960s and led efforts at industrialisation, would be the most offended. The performance at the school named in his honour was so horrid that it did not even measure in Mr Johnson's calculations.

Wasting of legacy

The school named after Edwin Allen, the education minister of the 1960s, who presided over a major classroom-building programme, squeezed into the double-quality score for maths and was a little bit ahead of Claude McKay in English. But other schools named for even more famous people were as bad or worse, among them Merlene Ottey and Donald Quarrie, the top-quality athletes, who are alive to witness this shame. For their sakes, it is perhaps good that the national heroes Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante and Marcus Garvey, who were great champions of education, are not alive to witness this wasting of their legacy and national humiliation.

What is particularly worrying, is how the principals of upgraded secondary schools pass off these dismal results as having nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the quality of the students who are streamed into their institutions - as if leadership doesn't matter. Well, it does!

Claude McKay would perhaps say to those principals: "Though far outnumbered, let us show ourselves brave".