Editorial | Reset Patterson Report

BUT FOR the fact that he shadows the portfolio for the Opposition, Damion Crawford could be forgiven for being seemingly unaware that the Orlando Patterson report on education transformation was actually tabled in Parliament.

Few people in the last Parliament are likely to have noticed, and fewer still in the wider population caught on. The tabling of the document by the former education minister, Fayval Williams, was a largely perfunctory affair.

Indeed, it is this newspaper’s sense that the reported implementation, over the past two years, of the recommendations of the Patterson Commission has been largely box-ticking, if not a performative, exercise. There is little clarity about the priorities for implementation, how they were determined, and what outcomes should be expected when they are completed.

Further, as The Gleaner has lamented since the report was delivered nearly four years ago, there has been little effort at a robust national discourse around its findings, and a squandered opportunity for its use as a platform from which to mobilise Jamaicans in a crusade against the country’s educational crisis.

In this regard, The Gleaner urges a reset of the discourse on the report, proposes its retabling in Parliament, and supports Mr Crawford’s call for a full debate by the House on the document. But that ought not to be the end of the process.

The Patterson Commission, chaired by Jamaican sociologist and Harvard professor Orlando Patterson, was established in 2020 by Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness to recommend ways to transform a dysfunctional system where a third of students completed primary school illiterate; less than a fifth of students who sat the Caribbean Examinations Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams passed five subjects, inclusive of maths and English, in a single sitting; and fewer than three in 10 Jamaicans pursue tertiary education/training.

MARGINAL IMPROVEMENTS

These numbers have shown marginal improvements – not transformative leaps. This year, for instance, 33 per cent of grade-four students failed to achieve “mastery” in literacy; 30 per cent fell short in numeracy.

At grade six, when students complete their primary education, 69 per cent were proficient in language arts, which tests their reading and comprehension skills at their grade/age level. That means three in 10 did not meet the standard. In maths, 37 per cent were not at the proficiency level.

Since the start of the new academic year last month, the education minister, Dana Morris Dixon, has mandated that reading be inserted as a specific subject into the time tables of grades one to three at primary schools. Students in these grades will have at least two hours of reading each week.

“... We are serious about stemming this literacy challenge that we have in our schools,” Dr Morris Dixon said in April.

While The Gleaner welcomes this and other initiatives, including by NGOs, to tackle the literacy crisis, we are also clear that there is a need for a more focused approach to the larger education deficit, given the competing demands for the limited resources – money and capacity – available to address the problem.

HARD CHOICES NEED TO BE MADE

This also takes into account Jamaica’s need for an educated and skilled workforce if it is to compete in an increasingly technologically driven global economy and extricate itself from its long-standing trap of low economic growth and low wages.

In other words, hard choices have to be made about the use of national resources, including where, and how, those allocated to the education sector should be deployed.

The Patterson Report made 365 recommendations, of which, according to Adrian Stokes, the chairman of the committee that monitors their implementation, 189 are in progress. Eighteen have been completed, although there has been no public report on their transformative impact.

Even with a stretching out of the timeline for implementing the remaining recommendations, that would mean completing 43 a year over eight years. That is a heavy haul in any context, and hard to achieve in Jamaica’s situation. Moreover, it does not reflect the approach necessary for crisis management.

Mr Crawford’s call for a full parliamentary debate on the Patterson Report, therefore, makes sense. It would give members of parliament as he suggested, an opportunity to make inputs on how to proceed; but more importantly, it could be the basis of a national reset, and a serious dialogue, around education.

Improving education, as we have posited before, would be part of the strategic mission of economic and social transformation.