Behind the agony of Jamaica’s schools

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8 Socialist Action march 2011 MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica—“Carib needs to reduce debt—IMF,” screams a headline in The Gleaner (Feb. 7, 2011). The Jamaican daily reports an International Monetary Fund spokesperson calling on “Caribbean countries, saddled with high debt levels and badly affected by the global economic crisis, ... to reduce debt and develop new sources of growth.” Good advice coming from the chief vampire of the world capitalist financial blood supply!

“While governments responded appropriately to the drop in tourism, trade, remittances and capital flows, they now face economic and social challenges...” Indeed, their people do, exacerbated by the sharp rise in food prices—which sparked the current uprisings against authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Egypt, and across the Arab world.

A major challenge is the steady disintegration of social infrastructure, with education at the head of the class. This is sadly the case in Jamaica, one of the world’s 13 most indebted nations (as a share of gross domestic product), five of which are now in the Caribbean.

High interest rate public-sector borrowing and the bail-out of the financial sector in the mid-1990s only deepened the morass of structural underdevelopment, rooted in centuries of mercantilism and the slave-based plantation system.

Successive governments did nothing to stem the out-outflow of profits from Jamaica’s economy. Manufacturing is marginal, and of the sweatshop type. The “service sector” predominates, now 60 per cent of the whole. Tourism accounts for 10 per cent of GDP, dominated by foreign-owned enterprises operating in the field.

Remittances amount to nearly 15 per cent of GDP and exports of bauxite and alumina make up about 10%. Inflation is a staggering 13 per cent. Unemployment is 12.9 per cent officially, but over double that if discouraged and chronically underemployed workers are included. Violent gangs and the drug trade draw heavily from the huge pool of jobless youths.

Jamaica signed a $1.27 billion, 27-month Standby Agreement with the International Monetary Fund for balance of payment support in February 2010. A matter of life and debt. The effect of social expenditure cuts, directly tied to IMF loan “conditionalities,” are occasionally featured in the media. In recent weeks the spotlight has been on public schools.

Merline Sewell-Sullivan is the principal at Kingston’s inner city Trench Town Primary School. She revealed to The Gleaner in late January why her school was the poorest performer in the 2009 national Grade Four Literacy Test, with a 64 per cent failure rate. Her students “sometimes ... come to school not eating anything the night before, much less breakfast.” Given limited resources, and thanks to the help of the Port Authority, they have a breakfast programme twice a week. The teachers come in early to prepare the meals.

“School-based literacy coordinator Janice Spencer-Francis said that most of the students do not even have books. In her grade-four class, only six of her 24 students have their prescribed books. “Most of our parents are single and are not working, and some have so many other children, they just can’t afford to buy the books. They live from hand to mouth.”

“As if those resource challenges were not enough, last October thieves broke into the school’s resource room and stole all their computer equipment with their software, learning programmes, lesson plans—everything that they struggled to put together over the years.”

“Late and poor attendance is also a major factor,” The Gleaner reported. “When the morning bell rings at 8, more than half the school population has not reported to school. ‘Some of the students are so tired when they finally get here, because they had to catch water before coming to school,’ said Francis. ‘So many are hungry because they had nothing to eat. They just can’t perform under these conditions.’”

Potential for student achievement is real. Trench Town Primary won several awards in sports, academics, and environmental projects between 1995 and 2009. Even against all the odds, hope persists.

Esther Tyson, principal of Ardenne High School in Kingston, is the author of a stinging op-ed in The Gleaner (Feb. 6) that accuses the Jamaica Labour Party government, led by Bruce Golding, of deliberately “demoralising secondary-school principals.” “First, they implement a policy of free education for all up to secondary education, then ignore the economic cost of educating each child and send to the schools less funds than what is needed for running a school efficiently.”

“In the meantime, when the principals arrange with parents to pay additional fees to cover the cost of the quality education (required), the leader of the nation declares that these principals are ‘extortionists.’”

Tyson asks, how can the equivalent of Cdn. $600 that the Ministry of Education gives each principal annually cover the cost of building maintenance, security, garbage disposal, graffiti clean-up, and replacement of damaged doors, locks, windows, grilles and furniture?

As the situation deteriorates, the government, which has yet to make good on wage improvements it negotiated with teachers over a year ago, seems keen to stoke the flames of conflict between parents and administrators. At the same time, according to Tyson, educators “have to face the constant challenge of leading schools with children who are the product of an increasingly coarse, uncivil, violent, and lawless society”.

The affluent minority take refuge in private schools, which only accelerates the decline of the public system. Nearly 10 per cent of students attend private “prep” schools, where fees average $1200 a year—well beyond the reach of most Jamaican parents.

Returning to the blame-the-workers game, Education Minister Andrew Holness signalled last December that he was prepared to fire teachers whose students do poorly on standardized tests. Holness is also promoting ‘performance-based pay’ for teachers. Sound familiar?

Nadine Molloy Young, president of the Jamaican Teachers’ Association, returned the volley: abstract standards and performance-based pay cannot work (undesirable at any rate) in a system rife with gross inequalities. “You have 60 students in front of you, and with this comes students with different learning challenges,” Molloy Young explained.

So, think back to the IMF-induced cutbacks that robbed society of a decent present and future. For this situation, both the JLP regime and the once left-populist Peoples National Party of Portia SimpsonMiller share the blame. Those parties are just two capitalist peas in a pod—bereft of the radical solutions required.

But just 90 miles north of Jamaica, in Cuba, where insurgent workers and farmers seized national sovereignty in 1959 and expropriated capital in 1961, no child is a street beggar. Few if any are hungry, lack proper shoes, clothes, books, or miss school. Today, Cuba produces a surplus of doctors to heal victims of Third World social and natural disasters, while Jamaica still produces a surplus of agony. n

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HAMILTON, Ont.—On Jan. 29, up to 10,000 union members and supporters from across Ontario and Quebec gathered in front of Hamilton’s City Hall in