My wife's nephew is among those graduated this year, with 10 grade one 2 grade two and 1 grade 3 which happen to be math. They are about to migrate to the US and is excited about college, I may be wrong but with that grade 3 in math, I don't think he would be accepted into a US college....

cherry picking con games by wannabe PPP smartmen and their Region 11 fellow travelers . . . is THIS what passes for statistical analysis in Guyana today?

hmmmm . . . mathematical and other illiteracies cultivated by the perfidious PPP cabal this past decade+ must be worse than advertised, smh

Education Crisis

The annual euphoria over the “high flyers” at CSEC and CAPE has hopefully receded by now. But before it disappears altogether, we should ponder what it means for a child of sixteen to successfully write twenty subjects at CSEC. While older heads might grumble that the CSEC syllabus and marking schemes have diluted the GCE “O” Levels of the past, they should be reminded that School Based Assessments (SBAs) have been added, which supposedly increased the level of difficulty of being successful at the exams.
These SBAs are actually assignments in the given subjects that are administered by the local teachers and graded to marking schemes suggested by CXC. In the natural science subjects, for instance, there are an average of eighteen SBAs each, while in the Social Sciences, there is usually one extended research paper on a particular topic. By April of the year in which a child is writing CSEC, he or she would have had to submit over a hundred SBAs if more than fifteen subjects are being attempted.
SBAs can constitute up to 40% of the marking scheme in a given subject which means that the “tested” portion of the exam becomes much less significant. If for instance, students are given 90% on an SBA (which is routinely awarded to identified students)  a 50% performance on the written test can still earn them a grade 2 depending on the curve along which the students will be graded.
At the last CXC official announcement of exam results for 2012, which was held in Guyana, a CXC official observed that “plagiarism” was a problem is some countries, including Guyana. Worse than that, would be if schools were found to be assisting students with their SBAs to boost their overall performance. It may be for this reason that we may have many students finishing secondary school in a blaze of glory with ten or more CSEC subjects passed, yet cannot even perform simple tasks such as drafting a letter if employed or starting University.
The efficacy of the performance of our educational system is therefore much more relevant if we consider the results of Mathematics and English which do not demand SBAs.  This year, passes at English A, which means Grades 1- 3, were 45.69% which represented an improvement compared to last year’s 37.02 percent. In Mathematics, Grade 1- 3 passes amounted to only 28.92%, a slight decrease from last year’s 29.69 percent. A Grade 3 pass is possibly equivalent to a raw score of maybe 40% so it is sobering to consider what these scores actually mean: over 70% of our students cannot score 40% on a mathematics examination for which they spent five years being prepared.
In addition, during the last two years, the Ministry of Education had made a focused intervention to boost the scores in these two key subjects. It is clear that something drastic must be done. Over in Jamaica, which has had comparable problems with their CSEC results, their Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites noted that research, “has shown that mathematics attainment is the single most reliable education factor which is directly linked to economic growth and development.”
What all of this means is that, as we have been pointing out for the last decade, we have to look beyond the “high flyers” and take note of what the exam results mean for the development of our country – not to mention the lives of the majority of individuals that make up “our country”.
As Rev Thwaites pointed out, numeracy is the sine qua non if we are ever to pull ourselves out of the underdevelopment trap. Research has also shown that the problem can only be remedied if we confront the problem holistically: we have to look at the student, his/her home environment and most critically, the competence of those hired to impart the knowledge base – the teachers.
The answer is certainly not for us to “dumb down” the exams or to game the system so that the results “look good”.

Education has become a victim of the widening gap between the rich and the poor

Dear Editor
As is to be expected, the government has tried to put the best spin on the recent CXC results. No doubt, those students who excelled along with the teachers at those schools that did well should be commended. But the results show clearly that despite some excellent individual performances our children as a group continue to under-perform. This is cause for great concern. If 7 out of ten students cannot pass Math, six out of ten cannot pass English and 4 out of ten cannot pass with top grades, then we have a national disaster on our hands.
It is difficult to pinpoint any single cause of this problem. But certainly governance must be high up on that list. It is at that level that national priorities are decided. It is there where the decision on how much resources are expended on education and how those resources are used. In short we are found wanting at the level of vision and policy.
A second cause of our poor results to my mind has to do with the way in which education has become a victim of the widening gap between the rich and the poor. It seems even with the naked eye that the results would reveal that the students who do well tend to be those whose parents are able afford extra lessons in a consistent manner and those who do the least well are those who do not have the same opportunities. And that class polarization in some instances, though not across the board, has an ethnic look to it. As David Granger observed, we have developed a kind of social apartheid in education that is reflected in the results. And that filters into the wider society. Allied to the second cause is the inability of poor parents and poor communities to offer the kind of supplementary assistance and guidance to the children. The recycling of poverty therefore is one of the major contributing causes of the problem. Poor people who have hustle and or work several jobs to make ends meet obviously do not have the time to oversee and monitor the children progress. Allied to that is the decline of the communities as spaces of collective pride, dignity, culture and learning. Education is no longer projected as the gateway to individual and collective overcoming.
Finally, the recycling of the mediocrity that comes out of the school system has implications for the preparation of future groups of students. We recruit some of our teachers from the same pool of under-prepared students and push them into the teaching system without the necessary training needed to close the gap that they bring with them from the school system.
Our politicians tell us how much we need Hydroelectricity and some have declared a period of mourning for the seemingly faltering Amaila Project. But even if we can get the best Hydro project in the world, if we do not pay the same attention to and expend more resources on properly educating our young people, we are going nowhere positive as a nation.
An uneducated nation can never be a productive nation. Education or lack of it has implications for the economy, for cultural uplifment and for social development. It is from this underprepared group of young people that we recruit our teachers, policemen and women and soldiers—those who are tasked with educating the next generation and with maintaining law and order. Those
tears which are being shed for Amaila should be shed for Education. The centrality of Hydroelectricity should be coupled with the centrality of Education Overhaul.
David Hinds

 Up to the mid nineties studebts coming from GUYANA were put in a class higher than their counterparts from other countries, Pesently the majority that comes from Guyana are put in an ELS(English as a second language)

class.

Those that came in before the mid nineties were educated under the PNC

You talking about high school?

Why not? Even people with GED get in college. 

I hope you are right or he probably have to do the GED when he gets here..

Not sure if he needs to get a GED. He might be able to get into a junior college. In the 70's, I was able to get into a junior college with my GCE.

I wish him luck.

If he completed HS and did CXC, I would say he take a course here and sit for the SAT's.

This education system that we have in Guyana is based on the British Education system of the 1950s'.  Where there is a pass and fail competition approach to the educational life of a person.  The system does not take into consideration slow learners or students forced to work to help the family after school or before school.  We need Khan academy introduced into every class room and family in Guyana.  So when a student of math cannot understand the math concepts then he or she can go them over with Sal until they understand.

Agreed. The system teaches you what to think; not how to think and solve problems.

This year Jamaica had pass rates of 38% in 2013 (as annopunced by the govt of Jca, which knows more about their performance than does any one in Guyana), and they are unhappy.  Guyana had 29% and they are4 making excuses.

What the PNC did or didnt do is irrelevant, given that the kids now taking CXC are 100% educated under the PPP, which has been in power for 21 years.  This means that by time that they entered school the PPP would have been in power for 10 years.

And by the way Jamaica isnt claiming thatbecause their results are better than Guyana's that they must not be thoroughly embarrassed at their poor performance.  No the are IMMEDIATELY implementing corrective strategies.

The PPP prefers to blame a past govt which had no involvement in educating this current cohort of Guyanese, who still perform way below teh standards of most other Caribbean nations.   Despite the fcat that the best Guyanese teachers are good enough to be aggressively recruited by several of these islands.

Please amend your statement to say MID SEVENTIES. 

By the 80s Guyanese kids were seen as poorly educated as the Jamaicans (traditionally under performers) and in fact a Jamaican educator in the NYUC system was shocked to discover this, given our history in the 60s and early 70s.

Our system was, and is elitist.

If you went to QC, or one of the other better schools, you were taught how to think.

For the other schools you are correct.

A kid arriving in the USA, who was educated in one of the BETTER high schools in the Caribbean is much better able to think for themselves, and develop an argument, based on sound analysis than the US public school kid.

The rote teaching is confined to the lower tier schools.