Georgetown : “We know in many cases children are doomed to fail because their teachers didn’t do what they were suppose to do,” said Chief Education Officer, Olato Sam, as he engaged an intense deliberation with teachers of South Georgetown recently. He was at the time addressing the Non-Repetition and Automatic Promotion Programme which was introduced some years ago by the education sector and has since been “hijacked and is now being called ‘the No Child Left Behind Policy’ which we really don’t have,” according to Sam.
According to the Chief Education Officer, the programme was designed as part of the Ministry’s intent to devise polices that look at the entire system and what is best for children within the system. However, he admitted that there have since been some flaws detected with the programme which was designed to ensure that students were not forced to repeat a class even if they did not pass all of the prescribed subjects.
Some teachers, according to Sam, are not entirely innocent in the process as reports from parents have suggested that they (teachers) have not been fully playing their roles to enable students to pass. “We have had parents coming in and telling us that my child say the teacher was there for six weeks out of the term but come and show up with an exam after 10 weeks and ‘I fail because they ain’t teach me’”
Teachers have however been lashing out at the Ministry of Education for introducing the Automatic Promotion initiative claiming that the programme facilitates students unwillingness to work but yet they have their eyes set on being promoting to another Grade. In fact according to Sir Kerwin Mars of the North Georgetown Secondary School some students are so dependent on the “No child left behind programme that they say you (teacher) can’t beat them, you can’t fail them and they will go over to the next class anyway.”
But according to Sam the Ministry did not take into consideration those students who were unwilling to genuinely learn even as he speculated that “I think we have all recognized that in introducing this policy initiative we could have done a better job of ensuring that more of our teachers understood the reason why we sis go down this path…”
This move, he said, was intended to arrest the problem whereby at least 70 per cent of those students who were forced to repeat in Grade Seven were not in the school system by Grade 10. Additionally, if a child who had repeated twice the percentage drop-out rate skyrocketed to about 90. “They were absent from school by Grade 10 and when we evaluated why that might be so what we saw happening was that we were just dropping those children back into the same Grade to do it over and we never bothered to find out why they were failing. We had never bothered to put any system in place to correct the deficiencies that they had.”
Students who failed repeatedly, according to Sam, were often challenged by the effects of a psychological burden which often transcends into them becoming disruptive during classes. Most of the failing students over the years have been males, Sam said. “What was happening before this programme could not have been working because if repetition was a deterrent to failure so many of our children would not be failing…If they were genuinely afraid to fail fewer children would have been failing each year.”
With the introduction of the Automatic Promotion Policy, Sam said that teachers were required to consult with parents by the second term of a school year when they realized that students are heading down a path of failure. In addition it advocates for the introduction of a remediation programme which students are mandated to attend to address their respective areas of failure. The latter move, according to Sam should have been accompanied by a roster whereby teachers are able to keep tract of those students who attended remediation sessions. “We asked teachers to let us know who those children were who did the remediation and those who didn’t so we would know who were in danger so that by June when we re-evaluate the programme we would see who came to remediation, and maybe the remedy would not be intended for everybody; not across the board.”
Prior to the automatic promotion initiative, Sam pointed out that some students, despite passing a number of subject areas and failed a few were forced to repeat an entire Grade even the subjects they had passed. “We required that children remained in that Grade for another year.” But according to the Education CEO, “that is antithetical to everything we know in education. They are not given the benefit of the work they did well!” Sam added.
