Bahama Pundit

Reality Checks in Education

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

There is a sustained and critical national dialogue on the state and direction of Bahamian education, most intensely as regards primary through secondary education in our public school system.

Success in reforming public education will be achieved through pragmatic solutions, borrowing ideas from across the ideological spectrum while challenging those including, sometimes, union leaders opposed to reforms such as merit pay, and more testing of and review of tenure standards for teachers.

Success will require a broad rethinking by political leaders, the education bureaucracy and parents as to how schools are run, the quality of in-school leadership and what a truly magnet school system may look like in New Providence and Grand Bahama.

But success will be stymied by ideological fantasies as typified in a letter to the press by the president of a local think-tank, which proposed a single thread-bare argument producing this logical fallacy and tautological disaster: public education is a failure because, well, it’s public education, or the equivalent of teaching little Johnnie and Jenny that the sky is blue, because the sky is blue.

Who is Making the Grade?

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

The recent release of the BJC and BGCSE results, including the accompanying national grade averages for these exams, was followed by the usual arguments, wailing and gnashing of teeth, surface analysis, finger-pointing and spin.

The results do tell us something about the teaching and learning in our schools, particularly in our public schools.

They are symptomatic of a rusting and outdated assembly-line system that has produced tens of thousands of students who lack basic competency in the most basic subject matters.

The Importance of Teachers in Improving Education

by Ralph Massey

Guest author Ralph Massey studied economics at Case University and at the University of Chicago, where his course advisor was Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate. His business career covered 37 years with four multinational companies. At Kimberly-Clark Corporation, for instance, he was assistant treasurer, and at Chemical Bank he was the offshore banking manager for the Bank of New Providence. He was a founding member of the Nassau Institute and since late 2004 has been a contributor to the work of the Coalition for Education Reform.

In a recent Tribune article, Adrian Gibson called Bahamian public education an “inadequate sham” and described this year’s public high school leavers in colourful terms.

Up to 60 per cent of them do not graduate; and in fact, they are, according to Mr. Gibson, a horde of “arithmetically-challenged halfwits” who get a certificate of attendance instead of a diploma. They are sexually permissive, speak and act offensively and are unprepared to enter the workforce. Yet…they attend lavish and wildly garish graduation proms.

Is Failure the Responsibility of Schools or Parents?

by Craig Butler

I was on the Platform with Wendal Jones and Godfrey Eneas recently. I must admit that I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I must not be as adept in explaining myself as I thought because the hosts and I locked heads all night.

The major point of contention was our education system. Before I go any further let me state that the role of parents in raising their children can never be abrogated or underestimated.

The foremost and best example for any child will always be those that are in the position to affect their lives, specifically the parents, guardians or custodians along with the extended family.

Accordingly these people must take an active role in ensuring that their children are taught morals and values and that they receive the education they need to enable them to play a meaningful and active role in society.

The Problems of Bahamian Education

by Larry Smith

"Well into the 20th century...Bahamian education was both backward and socially skewed. Many black Bahamians remained illiterate and only an exceptional few, whose parents could spare them and afford the fees, aspired to any form of secondary education.” -- Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream.

Although church-based schools have been around since the 1700s, it was the need to educate large numbers of emancipated slaves that led to the first "Board of Public Instruction" in 1836.

By the beginning of the 20th century there were half a dozen public schools on New Providence and 38 in the out islands (as well as a few private schools) teaching about 8,000 pupils in all. But over the past century, our education bureaucracy has exploded.

This year alone the government will spend $265 million on scores of public schools (and the College of the Bahamas) to educate more than 50,000 students. Yet experts say this massive investment is producing a growing underclass of functional illiterates who are virtually unemployable.

That's the startling verdict that is consistent with the research commissioned by a respected private sector group called the Coalition for Education Reform. This alliance of key labour and business leaders has been calling for dramatic education reforms over the past three years, but public officials don't seem to be listening.

Prince Charles, Me, and the Governor-General's Youth Award

by Larry Smith

You may not know this, but Tough Call grew up with Prince Charles.

He and I are about the same age, we went to the Clifford Park Independence celebrations together, and we still haven't figured out what we are supposed to do in life.

I clearly recall Charles' troubled childhood. But while he may have had distant and pre-occupied parents, he certainly enjoyed a much finer education than I did.

During the 1960s, while I was lectured by a Scot named Roger Kelty in un-air conditioned classrooms at Queen's College, Charles was at Gordonstoun - an elite school set in a 17th century Scottish estate that could have been the model for Harry Potter's Hogwarts Academy.

Students at Gordonstoun and its associated schools are committed to "academic excellence, personal development and responsibility...achieved by participating in community service, work projects, exchange programmes and adventuring."

Wow! Other than picking up rocks on the playing field and writing lines about 'trifling in de corridor' (set by prefect Winston Jones), all I can remember from my school days are Mr Kelty's literary jokes (as in "There's a divinity that shapes our ends...") - which he continues to email me from his Lifeless Cay office.

A D+ NATION? CHANGING THE SCHOOLS WILL CHANGE THE GRADE

The past few years have seen a rising chorus of concern over our failing educational system. Both private and public sector leaders say we are facing a national "crisis" with the potential to destroy our prosperity and our childrens' future. Several articles on this site have outlined the scope of the problem and discussed some of the solutions. Here we present the views of Neil Sealey, a Bahamian who has spent 25 years in higher education, serving as a professional examiner for GCE O and A levels, as well as the BGCSE exams, and instructing trainee teachers at the College of the Bahamas and in-service through field courses and workshops. He received an MA in Geography from the University of Oxford and was awarded a fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has written several text books that are currently used in Bahamian schools, and continues to be active in research and writing.

The problem
Following reports and debates on the state of education earlier this year we now have the annual results from the high schools on our students’ achievements – another D+. While every country tends to bemoan its educational system, and many will say standards are falling universally. There is no reason to feel that improvements are out of our reach. In fact many countries do better than us and it is quite possible to quickly and effectively overhaul and improve our educational system.

Although a number of social factors are contributing to the present situation, such as the increase in single-parent families, the impact of drugs and gangs, and lack of parental guidance, this should not disguise the fact that the educational system itself is inadequate, or that the government cannot do anything without everyone else doing something as well. This would be burying our heads in the sand. This is not a problem that is going to go away, and it is not going to solve itself. It is a problem with a solution that needs action now. As has been said elsewhere ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’.

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.

The Bahamas Must Improve its Workforce

by Andrew Allen

As anyone who has ever had broad dealings with both private and public sector employees in The Bahamas well knows, the challenges of producing a better workforce within the modern Bahamian cultural and educational setting defy the kind of talk politicians typically bring to the debate.

In short, we have a country following an economic model that relies almost exclusively upon human resource-based advantages, while in fact the weakness of those human resources is a standing joke even among ourselves.

In this, we offer a stark contrast with places like Singapore, Malaysia and even India, all of which have found niches in sectors that are not traditional in the developing world. They have all, to some extent, sought to leapfrog the industrial stage of development and dive straight into high-tech service industries, largely on the strength of their excellent education systems and high quality workforces.

A Primer on Bahamian Education

by Larry Smith

This past summer scores of experts from around the country sat down in a hotel ballroom at great expense to figure out how to “transform” our failed education system. It was the first major re-evaluation of Bahamian schools since a national task force was set up in January, 1993.

What happened at this four-day meeting has implications for the 50,000-plus students in our public schools as well as our entire future as a modern society. But we have yet to receive any kind of report. To help put this critical issue into perspective, here is a primer on Bahamian education.