November 25, 2018
The PEP and GSAT debate: A system found wanting?
Dear Editor,
The assessment from the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) is intended to guide the educational treatment in high schools, compared to the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) scores that were used only to manage student placement in preferred schools, leaves Jamaica caught on the horns of a dilemma trying to pour modern education wine into outdated traditional education bottle.
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In order for Jamaica to be economically and socially competitive with our major trading partners, we must, with urgency, complete the transformation of our early childhood, primary and high school education system which we begun in 2004. This transformation is an imperative so as to ensure that over 95 per cent of the members of our workforce have at least a high school education and certification, as this is the reality for our major trading partners. Today, only 30 per cent of the Jamaican workforce is so educated.
The early childhood, primary and high school education system standardised by our trading partners is a deliberately established facility open to all their children, because the social and economic advantage afforded them by having a secondary level educated workforce is what attracts the high skill, high wage, job-creating investments that secure and sustain the competitive developed status of their economies and societies.
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Jamaica still continues to tweak an exclusionary education system, designed from the tenets of the Negro Education Grant 1835-1845, to ensure the uninterrupted supply of manual labour needed to sustain the plantation economy of yesterday’s Jamaica — an education system that rendered 67 per cent of our people illiterate at the time of our Independence in 1962; a system that established universal primary education only in the mid-1970s; a system that by the 1980s and beyond produced 50,000 11-year-old primary school graduates seeking a secondary education, but which had only 14,000 secondary spaces available for them.
An education system that invented a placement management mechanism, dubbed the Common Entrance Exam, used to cream off the highest-scoring 14,000 youngsters and placed them in the secondary schools themselves exclusively labelled and ranked in order of preference as “traditional high schools”.
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With Jamaica’s achievement of universal secondary education, succeeding education ministers have attempted to introduce a “zoning” approach to effect the placement of secondary-aged students in a high school in closest proximity to their homes. In this proposed arrangement, the 11-year-olds would have already been assessed using the then newly introduced diagnostic achievement testing mechanism, GSAT, which produced both the usual student’s achievement scores and also a learner profile that would enable the high school educators to prescribe the appropriate educational treatment for each student as guided by their individual profile. The PEP is a further improvement on the GSAT as a modern learner assessment mechanism.
Our current education system dilemma will remain so long as we Jamaicans refuse to acknowledge that the structure and operation of our education system cannot produce the 21st century Jamaican workforce we so badly need — a workforce armed with at least a solid secondary education, trainable and skilled, as is stated in the ‘Profile of the Educated Jamaican’ set out in the education transformation document of 2004, and which was fully endorsed by our Parliament, affirming that “Every child can learn and each child must learn”.
Robert L Gregory
gregoryrobert6@gmail.com
