The final results of the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) were published late September last year, less than two months after the new People / Civic Progressive Party Ministry (PPP / C) took office. The exams had been suspended for almost a month in April 2020 and written under the new COVID-19 restrictions. The results were followed by the usual media hype, noting that although we have achieved the Millennium Goal of providing “universal” primary education, the event is still significant for our people. Meaning, for several reasons, that the NGSA, which replaced the old “Common Entrance” exam, still denies the latter’s old promise of a better future for the high-performing kids.
In our slave-based society, the way out of the penury of the descendants of the poor former slaves was through “education”. This tradition was raised by the descendants of the indoor servants who followed them on the sugar plantations. The routes for promotion in colonial society dictated the logic of that path. But for the poor of the post-slavery age, on the avenue from the Church-run primary schools to the elite Queen’s and Bishops grammar schools established in Georgetown for upper strata children, who were expected to run the society when they graduated, fee money proved to be the major stumbling block. The same, albeit smaller, barrier was placed at the entrance of the private high schools that grew mostly in Georgetown.
After World War II, the Common Entrance examination offered the elite schools a place for a handful of the highest performers nationwide, who were now in special “scholarship” classes for the exam. With the nationalization of all schools in 1976, it was expected that the “scholarship” classes would disappear now that there was room for every child in the secondary stream.
But all that really changed was that the “scholarship” classes were “privatized”, which they continue to this day. What the great excitement about the current crop of top performers – the “top one percent” – means that they now have the opportunity to attend the same elite Queen’s and Bishops schools, with three others below them in the site now. Nearly all “top” children interviewed spoke about how excited they were about to enter “Queens”. In a sense, therefore, little has changed in the last half century.
Not that the discrepancy had gone unnoticed by then Education Minister Priya Manickchand back in 2013. There was a promise that there would be “equalization” of all the country’s secondary schools, which would, in turn, have made the existence of primary “secondary” debates. It is quite unfortunate that the change in Government in 2015 clearly abolished those plans. But now that it’s back in the same portfolio with a clear mandate from the electorate, the hope is that those plans, in our new oil-fuel economy, will be scrapped and implemented.
The change from “Common Entrance” to NGSA was in itself a step to make the secondary school entrance less of an “all or nothing” event. “Assessments” rather than “exams” were supposed to be fairer, especially when they were spread over three grades – 2, 4 and 6. But from what we saw, no one uses the early assessments for remedial action and critics maintain that they only tripled the stress on the young students.
With Guyana about to make a quantum leap to higher orbitals of growth rates, unless the education system retools itself to allow every student of the primary system to believe that he or she can make a legitimate contribution to that growth, the youngsters who conclude that failures due to their poor performance in the NGSA can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can talk all we want about increasing the “local content” of the new economy, but we must accept that the latter requires a more educated population both qualitatively and quantitatively.
We have to start at the beginning.
