Mrs Ena Barclay, the president of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), is indeed, correct: Jamaica teachers deserve to be paid commensurate with their contribution to the enterprise. We, of course, would say the same for all workers.

The issue, though, is how to determine what is commensurate with contribution. Mrs Barclay, based on her Teachers' Day message last week, seems to imply that the contribution by the teaching fraternity, as a whole, is inherently "invaluable".

This is not a stance that is unusual for someone in Mrs Barclay's position. It is a stance to which the teachers union strictly adheres and, in part, explains the JTA's resistance to the agreement between trade unions and the Government that exchanges job security for moderate pay hikes.

Fundamentally flawed

For the record, this newspaper believes that the basis of the MOU is fundamentally flawed. It builds inefficiency in the public sector by maintaining a bloated bureaucracy and entrenching mediocrity at the expense of excellence. Genuine reform, that is, one that is properly executed, would accomplish the task of moderating the growth of public sector wages and help to staunch the fiscal deficit, while, at the same time, unleashing creativity.

Teachers would be among the public-sector employees who would be immediate beneficiaries of this culling of public-sector blubber. There is an insufficiency of teachers, so theirs are not the jobs that would be lost. And we could pay them better.

But this brings us to the point where we differ from Mrs Barclay and the JTA: their resistance to measures to determine increments or performance-based pay.

We remind Mrs Barclay and teachers generally of a few pertinent facts. Less than 40 per cent of students who are at grade one achieve mastery of all four areas of the grade readiness inventory. About 40 per cent of the students at grade four do not master the literacy programme and up to a third of the children end primary school illiterate. The mean average score for children at grade six is below 50 per cent. Only a handful of secondary school students leave with five subjects, including maths and English, at CXC.

Responsibility

The foregoing is not a full inventory of the ills of the education system and, clearly, all its problems cannot be laid at the doors of teachers. Our problem, though, is the consistent failure of teachers to take any responsibility for poor education outcomes. The arguments, excuses some would claim, range from the poor quality of teachers who are streamed into some schools to over-size classes and dysfunctional communities.

We do not deny problems that impact on the performance of teachers. Nor do we accept that they are the only causes for the performance of Jamaican students or that good teachers do not make a difference. We also reject the argument that it is impossible to measure performance in classrooms by subjects or in institutions as a whole. Indeed, there are several models in use in other countries. And it can't be beyond Jamaica's capacity to adapt any of these for its circumstance.

We commend Mrs Barclay to the idea of performance-based pay, rather than allowing the mediocre to ride freely on the efforts of the good and excellent.