Conduct research on ‘failing school’ students who excel
THE EDITOR, Sir:
THE ONGOING discussion in the media concerning the report put out by the police indicates a fundamental problem which arises whenever we discuss matters to do with education.
We refuse to realise that consistent trends in outcomes tend to point to systemic causes. The same schools come at the top of the rankings for several years and the same ones tend to come at the bottom, and the ones at the bottom are found to have more miscreants than the ones at the top, and we think that the findings are significant.
As columnist Orville Taylor pointed out on Sunday, the results do not tell us anything that we do not already know. Once we place students in high schools on the basis of GSAT scores, we are placing them along with their support systems, parental and otherwise.
GSAT scores also reflect the type of support systems that students have. Five years later, the CXC passes will also reflect the type of support systems they have, along with the input from teachers at the schools they attend.
EXCEPTIONAL RESULTS
So we find that a number of students at the school branded as a failing school gets exceptional results which place him alongside the best at the highly ranked schools and ahead of most, and we simply write them off as ‘exceptions that prove the rule’.
However, exceptions do not prove the rule, but in fact prove that what we thought to be a rule was not in fact a rule. Anomalies are red flags that tell us to examine our assumptions again and make a paradigm shift to arrive at a more plausible theory.
Instead of looking at numbers, we should look at qualitative differences in students who get radically different outcomes after attending the same schools from similar home environments. That will more likely tell us something new and useful.
Vauxhall seems like the sort of place where such research ought to be done. It would be good to do case studies on a variety of students at that school to look at the influences that lead in different directions. As Hyacinth Evans pointed out in her book titled Inside Jamaican Schools, in matters of education, qualitative analysis is more relevant than the quantitative kind. Children are not abstractions and ought not to be treated as such.
KUDOS TO VAUXHALL PRINCIPAL
Let me take time out to compliment the principal of Vauxhall on how she has approached the matter of entering students for CXC exams. It should be national policy to have all students enter for exams after five years. It might be reasonable for the school to recommend those who deserve to have fees paid by Government, but barring students from taking the standard regional examinations at the school they attended for five years is unjust and futile. The school is still accountable for the outcomes of those students wherever they take the exams.
Furthermore, we need to understand that a child who gets a grade four in a subject may still benefit from having done it. If all the students who have been barred over the years from taking math and English had achieved fours and fives, we would now have a more literate and numerate society than we do now. R. HOWARD THOMPSON howardthompson507@yahoo.com Mandeville, Manchester