It is time to end the dithering and take the hard decisions, unless we intend that Jamaica's educational outcomes become more depressingly dismal than they already are.

Just how bad we are, for the complacent who need reminding, was highlighted last week by this newspaper's publication of weighted rankings of secondary schools, based on the performance of students at CXC in English and math in 2006 and 2007.

But even before last week, we all knew we were in an educational crisis. Indeed, the education ministry's own data show that only 52 per cent of the students who wrote math at CXC received passing grades. Yet, even that figure shows the depth of the problem. For when the total cohort is taken into account, and not just those who are allowed to do the exams, the pass rate in English, as Dr Ralph Thompson, the education activist, has often pointed out, is a mere 29.1 per cent. In math it is 16.5 per cent.

Special task force

But nothing in these figures ought to surprise anyone who has been paying attention. In fact, it was an appreciation of just how close we were to the precipice, or so we assumed, that caused former Prime Minister Patterson to establish a special task force on education, headed by Dr Rae Davis, which delivered its report in 2004.

Much of the focus on that report has been on its call for a $220-billion increase in spending on education over a 10-year period. Finding that additional $22 billion a year has and will continue to prove difficult, although the education ministry's budget has now reached $54 billion, up from the $30 billion of the task force report. Much of that hike, surely, has been eroded by inflation.

But while finances are important, there are other elements of the report which we feel have not received sufficient attention and for which the approach to implementation has, at best, been one of foot dragging.

Not least of these has been the task force recommendation regarding that big, bloated and unwieldy bureaucracy called the education ministry, where the entrenched vested interests, unable to get out of their own way, topple over each other. Indeed, as a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers previously concluded, the education task force found that the functions of many areas of the ministry overlapped, and that far too great a portion of its effort was basic maintenance rather than educational outcomes.

Performance

The task force proposed that the ministry be radically down-sized to focus on policy, curriculum design, standards, policy and policy monitoring. Education management, then, would be decentralised; governance and management responsibilities would be ceded to schools; and, regional education authorities, unlike the ministry's regional offices, which are really parts of the centre in the parishes, would be semi-autonomous bodies and demand accountability from schools. In such a system, the jobs of principals and classroom teachers would have to rest on the performance of their schools, which means the educational outcomes of students.

We suspect that much has not happened because of the interest of the education bureaucrats to protect their fiefdom - and a lack of gumption on the part of ministers. But things can't be much worse. So, Andrew Holness, the education minister, should bite the bullet.