The initiative, announced last week by Education Minister Andrew Holness, to employ the principals of the island's schools on fixed-term contracts should be embraced all round.

It is good for taxpayers, to whom, ultimately, all teachers who are paid by the state are accountable. And it is good for the principals themselves, notwithstanding the fears or reservations they may now harbour. Indeed, even the obscurantist leadership of the Jamaica Teachers' Association dares not deny the urgent need for reform of the sector over which it presides.

The performance of Jamaican students in requisite exams after five years in high school declares the need. In the June 2008 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exam, for example, only 54 per cent of the Jamaican students who wrote English received passing grades. For math, the rate was 43 per cent.

But even these ratios mask the severity of the crisis. In English, 43 per cent of the entire grade-11 cohort was excluded from the exam. For math, the exclusion rate was 52 per cent. Or, looked at another way, over 17,000 grade-11 students who ought to have been sitting CSEC in English were, for whatever reason, excluded. In the case of math, more than 20,000 did not do the test.

Matriculation requirements

When the ratios are calculated as a proportion of the cohort - as against those who were allowed to write the exams - the pass rate for English is 31 per cent. For math it is 21 per cent. Moreover, only a fifth of students leave secondary school with the requirements for matriculation to higher education, or being reasonably ready for the job market.

That's not all. Each year up to a third of children complete primary school without full mastery of the skills of literacy and numeracy.

It may be true that Jamaica's education system is not resourced to the levels needed to provide the most optimal results. But viewed in the context of this country's economic situation, the government's efforts can hardly be derided. This year, for instance, $71 billion has been earmarked for education, which is twelve and a half per cent of the national Budget. However, when debt-servicing charges are excluded, education's share of government spending is 30 per cent.

Two-third's of the sector's expenditure is on wages and salaries.

Constraints

It would be the most uncaring and intellectually callused who would hold that Jamaica gets value for the money spent on education, or that much better can't be achieved, even with the social, structural and demographic constraints that are often paraded by the education establishment.

Indeed, there are pockets of excellence within the system, including in supposedly deprived institutions. The difference, often, in such institutions is the quality of leadership. Good principals who hold themselves and their teachers accountable tend to get decent results.

Fixed-term contracts for principals, with performance clauses, will help to address the issue of accountability by limiting the hiding places of the laggards. In that regard, performers would be rewarded for their effort.

As part of this process, the education ministry must quickly establish performance criteria for each school, terminate the employment of all principals and have those who want to continue reapply for their jobs. Among the criteria for employment should be the successful completion of appropriate psychometric tests.

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