This Last week, as Jamaicans lauded the efforts of the country's teachers as part of the celebration of Education Week, Education Minister Andrew Holness made a simple, but profoundly critical observation.

"Modern society," Mr Holness said at a function in Montego Bay, "requires one to understand the language system, comprehend, be innovative, communicate, participate in social responsibility and be environmentally aware. That is what being literate is today."

Failure to produce this broadly literate citizen, as Mr Holness pointed out in another context recently, is to place the society at risk, and none is more vulnerable than the young male, who, by and large, is the perpetrator and victim of violent crime in Jamaica.

Indeed, of the 40,000 or so students who 'graduate' from Jamaica's high schools each year, less than 20 per cent achieve matriculation requirements for immediate entry into tertiary education, or, as the Education Task Force of 2004 put it, without the wherewithal to command decent jobs.

Low standard of literacy

Or, as Mr Holness bluntly put it at a ceremony honouring teachers in St James: "Our standard of literacy has been so low."

The crisis in education does not begin at, neither is it confined to, the secondary level. Each year, up to a third of students complete primary school barely functionally literate and, at grade four, well over 40 per cent fail to master the critical components of literacy and numeracy.

Fixing these problems is urgent. For, as was implicit in Mr Holness's argument at the conference on the risks faced by Caribbean youth, failure will further weaken Jamaica's capacity to compete effectively in the global marketplace, limit its capacity for economic growth and, thereby, place the society, especially its young people, at greater risk.

But as Mr Holness and all stakeholders in education are well aware, repairing this broken education system is no easy task. It will require tough action, not least of which is holding people accountable. Taxpayers have to insist on better returns on the nearly $72 billion - that is around 30 per cent of all spending after debt servicing - that the Government allocated to education this fiscal year.

Performance-based pay

For instance, we continue to insist that it is profoundly sensible that the salaries of teachers should be tied to outcomes - that is, there ought to be a system of performance-based pay.

Notwithstanding the claims to the contrary by the teachers' union, the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), it cannot be beyond the skills and capacity of Jamaican professionals to devise such a system, taking into consideration the demographic and/or socio-economic circumstances within which a specific school or group of schools operate. Hopefully, the JTA will soon relent and embrace the wisdom of this approach.

But there is something so far proposed, which, we presume, can only find full endorsement from the JTA - moving school principals to fixed-term rather than open-ended contracts. Principals, after all, are like CEOs of substantial organisations and should be allowed to operate and be judged as such. In other words, they should have specific performance targets for their institutions against which they are measured and compensated accordingly.

Mr Holness must move ahead with this plan.

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