Bahamian Education Reform

by Larry Smith

Education is one of today’s celebrity issues. The question of how to fix our failing schools appeared on the radar earlier this year and has become even more controversial lately.

Government held a “secret” national education conference last summer (the 18th so far) and a coalition of private sector employers and trade unions finally released a disturbing report on educational failings after spending months unsuccessfully trying to present it directly to Education Minister Alfred Sears.

We drew attention to some of their conclusions last August. The coalition report (titled the Untapped Resource) was one of several research papers included in the Ministry of Education’s conference journal, which has never been publicly circulated.

Not surprisingly, there has been no word from the government on the results of last July’s expensive conference. But the general idea was to come up with a strategic plan for education in the 21st century, recognising that “knowledge is the most important factor in economic development” today.

To paraphrase Central Bank economist John Rolle (who spoke at the conference): Economic success in a competitive world requires greater productivity, which is achieved by diligently applying skills we have been taught. If we are not learning the fundamental skills of literacy, numeracy and technological literacy – we are only digging a big hole for ourselves.

“Our students are going to have to take care of us in the future‚” Mr Rolle points out. “And they are only going to be able to do this, to our future comfort, if they are just as productive as the future workers of Asia, Europe, or North America.”

But the plain fact is, although we have allocated significant human and financial resources to education for decades, the actual results are distressing to say the least.

There are many theories about how to improve the teaching of science, maths and english...better teachers, better schools, administrative devolution, depoliticisation, privatisation, more computers, more pre-schooling, more technical education, more money, more security, a new curriculum.

And we should not overlook the ever-popular ‘signage solution’. You know, those unsightly billboards that exhort us to ‘protect our tings’ and make ‘accident prevention our intention’.

There is a movement in the United States, for example, to address the behavioural problems of youngsters by posting the Ten Commandments in schools. And some Congressmen went so far as to suggest that this could have stopped two teenage gunmen from shooting 36 fellow students and teachers at Columbine High School in Colorado six years ago.

It has been referred to as the “cosmic bumper sticker” theory of education.

Here’s what others have to say about education in the world’s greatest nation: “American children can't read or work math problems without a calculator. They can't spell, find their own country on a map, name the president of the United States or quote the founding fathers... American students placed 19th out of 21 nations in math, 16th in science, and dead last in physics.”

Well, if that is what public education is like over the bar just think of the problems we are facing here!

And that is despite the fact that America has spent huge sums on education over the past 20 years. This has led some to argue that the causes of the failure are the fashionable ideas and interference of the education bureaucracy itself.

Proponents of smaller government in the US have long called for the abolition of the Department of Education, which was established in 1953 and became a separate cabinet-level agency in 1980. Its 4500 employees and $71.5 billion budget are said to be completely unnecessary at the federal level.

To deal with America’s education problems, the Bush Administration (with strong bipartisan support) proposed four basic reforms. First, run annual standardised tests on all schoolchildren from 9-15 years of age, and publish reports on their progress. Second, make schools accountable for their performance. Third, remove federal regulations in exchange for improved results. And fourth, let parents spend federal money to send their children to private or parochial schools if they wish.

Economist Rolle argues that we should focus immediate attention on extending school hours and changing the curriculum to devote more time to maths, communications, languages and computer science: “Our goal should be to advance (these) skills by at least two years beyond those targeted for the BGCSE,” he said.

Others call for greater accountability, arguing that we should run schools like airlines, which are governed by international safety standards: Pilots must be qualified and certified to fly the aircraft type. There must be ongoing pilot training and pilots who don’t perform can be fired, whereas planes that don’t meet the safety code can’t be used.

But in all of this technical debate, we should not overlook the importance of concerned and interested parents.

And in this context, the figures are frightening. Over half of all births in the Bahamas are out of wedlock. More than two thirds of young Bahamians are from single parent homes, and in most of these cases the single parent is a teenage woman. More and more boys are growing up without a male role model. According to some reports, about 40 per cent of boys drop out of the public school system.

Many experts believe the issue of parenting is the crux of our education and crime problems – because unwanted children have worse outcomes than children who are welcomed by their parents. Both these problems dramatically intersect on high school campuses, where teachers are terrorised and police officers beaten by gangs of uncontrollable students.

In fact, there is a strong correlation between the drop in the American crime rate during the 1990s and the legalisation of abortion some 20 years earlier. According to the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics (by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Steven Dubner), “The crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalised abortion led to less unwantedness: unwantedness leads to high crime.”

Of course, our situation does not exactly parallel the American experience. We don’t have the same overt concerns about abortion. But the issue here is unwantedness, and there are many Bahamian children who were born simply as a means of prying money from the pockets of disappearing boyfriends, or as a mistake due to ignorance, or as a demonstration of fertility.

These children are not nurtured by responsible parents, the argument goes, so they grow up with disciplinary problems and learning deficiencies. As they reach their late teens - in a society that hardly bothers to enforce rules and resorts to arch hypocrisy on most moral issues - they often turn to crime.

As the coalition report concluded: “Refining the public education system can only be accomplished with strong leadership over a long time using strategies that are clearly stated and widely endorsed.”

If the government sees the issue as one of power and control (which all governments tend to do) rather than applying clear strategies in a non-political way, then education will continue to fail and our society will suffer the more for it.

The best new year’s gift the government could give this country would be to issue a clear in-depth report on the choices we face in education, call for a short, sharp debate, and agree on a bipartisan approach for immediate action.