Placing for Failure

The final paper that I wrote for Principles of Teaching and Learning.

It gives a crude overview of the Jamaican high school system, its placement mechanism, and some of the equity / social justice problems associated with it. Full disclosure + apology: We had an eight-page limit (double-spaced) and were only allowed a max. of seven outside sources; the paper ends rather abruptly, at the end of the eighth page. I also wrote most it while suffering from severe caffeine withdrawal. I apologize.

I think I'm going to write further comments on this paper and Holness' plan later today, if I get time. Today is also apartment-cleaning day. We're currently working on the kitchen, so we'll see.

In the meantime, I've posted some comments from Jamaican readers in the comments section.

Happy reading,
Katherine

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Placing for Failure: GSAT and the Jamaican Secondary Education System
August 12, 2009

Contemporary Context
In Jamaica, for two days every March, elementary education institutions across the island are closed to the general student population, so that they may be transformed into testing centers for the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT). Each year, almost 50,000 sixth-grade students will take 5.75 hours’ worth of standardized tests that will determine, in many cases, the rest of their lives. By law, none of these students may be over 13. The youngest have recently turned eleven. These pre-pubescent youngsters spend two days attempting to demonstrate their knowledge of nationally-standardized content covered during the last one-and-a-half years of their elementary education: multiple choice exams in Language Arts, Mathematics, Social Studies, and Science last an hour or more each; a further hour is spent writing responses to the two Communication Tasks sections (Ministry of Education, 2008).

Many of these students’ parents have spent months—in some cases, years—helping to prepare their children as best as they can for these examinations. They know the stakes: the highest performers in the island will win government- and private sector-sponsored scholarships to the best high schools in the nation. On the other hand, although every student’s family submits a list of five preferred secondary institutions, many performers on both the higher and the lower ends of the spectrum will be placed in schools not of their choice (Bailey, 2005; Francis, 2009). Some test-takers will score so badly that they will be promoted to “secondary institutions” that are, in fact, merely an extension of their former primary schools, with no significant change in curriculum (Bailey; King, 1998). The Ministry considers the following five inputs when awarding places to secondary schools:

1. Students’ composite standard score
2. Students’ choices
3. Available places for each secondary school, broken down by gender
4. Students’ gender
5. Ministry’s Proximity List: This list is compiled by officers in the different regions who have intimate knowledge of the location and proximity of sending schools in relation to receiving schools. (Ministry of Education, 2008, pp. 9-10)

The only input that students’ families may control in any real sense is the second one, the list of five secondary institutions at which the student would prefer to be placed. Yet, even this element of control may be seen as tenuous, at best.

The rate of successful admission to the secondary institutions most commonly named as first choice schools is comparable with the admissions rates of Ivy League and other competitive colleges in the United States. Just under 15% of applicants for the five most popular first choice schools will be admitted, due to space restrictions. If the field is widened to include the ten most popular first choice schools, the admissions rate becomes 17.2%. The most ‘selective’ school, Campion College, has an admission rate of about 11.8% (Ministry of Education, 2006).

After taking the GSAT, students never again see the content of their examinations, and generally receive notification of their placement and grades in early June. As such, students cannot learn from mistakes made on the exam, in hope of improving their knowledge base. Although there are official routes for families to challenge the results that they have been presented if an error is suspected, students only have one opportunity to navigate the examinations successfully; they cannot be retaken in the case of a genuinely unfavorable result.

High School Placement: An Equity Issue
Students’ GSAT scores, viewed in comparison to the other scores of their cohort, are the only measure of student achievement (academic or otherwise) being used to determine high school placement. According to their performance on the GSAT, students are ranked from first to last:
The same principle is used to place each student, starting with the highest rank. The student’s school of first choice is checked for the availability of a space in which to place a student of this gender. If a place is available, the student is placed in that secondary school. If there is no place available, the process is repeated with the student’s next preferred school. If all five preferences are exhausted, without being able to place the student, the process continues in the same manner, with each school on the MoE Proximity List. (Ministry of Education, 2008)

Although the mechanism used to place students in schools is largely automated and is the same for each student, the difference between the GSAT scores that separate the 17% of aspirants who get into the most-requested schools of choice from the remaining 83% can be so miniscule as to suggest that a child’s placement may be determined by sheer chance. As Francis (2009) reports, this can make justifying the difference in outcomes difficult: “the scores that separated the top performers last year were less than half of a percent. "Why should I then place a child that gets 99.1 outside of their choice range and place a child that gets 99.2 in their choice range?" [the Minister of Education] asked.”

The stratification of Jamaican secondary institutions in terms of prestige, curricular goals, and educational outcomes further complicates the issue. If a student does not get into a top traditional high school through GSAT placement, research (Bailey, 2005; Holness, 2009; King, 1998) suggests that differences among institutions and few chances for students to transfer to more rigorous or better-performing institutions create vastly unequal outcomes, even for students attending different institutions that fall within the same category of secondary institutions.

Bailey further argues that current methods of high school placement reinforce areas of socioeconomic segregation within society by rewarding those who already are well-off with high school placements that will allow them to continue being well-off. She finds that the home addresses of the students who attend a traditional, well-performing high school located in a more upscale area of Kingston are overwhelmingly located in suburbia and in middle/high income areas of the metropolis. In contrast, a comparable (though significantly lower performing) high school located in downtown Kingston primarily draws from families living in downtown and transition areas of the city.

Bailey counters the argument that less-affluent residents of Kingston may aspire to different outcomes than more affluent residents of Kingston by discussing the outcome of focus group discussions conducted with eight- to ten-year-olds in both lower- and higher-income socioeconomic groups. She finds that both groups have “what are considered to be middle class aspirations” (p. 68) and desired upward mobility through education, but that, due to unequal elementary education, the lower-income cohort was already behind their richer peers in academic achievement.

Even if one is to disregard the literature that reinforces the idea that “any decision about a student’s continued education… should not be based on the results of a single test” (Oakes & Lipton, 2007, p. 230), the systematic tendency of GSAT to propagate systemic inequalities in elementary education and create inequities of post-secondary outcome between higher- and lower-income students should be enough to view the exam and the system of education to which it is tied as inherently unjust. Fixing GSAT alone is not enough; without enough “quality” institutions to receive students who leave elementary education, regardless of what method of placement is used, educational outcomes of different groups will be wildly inequitable.

The Social and Educational History of Inequitable Outcomes
Oakes and Lipton highlight the falsity of meritocratic mechanisms as engineers of social mobility and change: “The problem with the myth of merit is that it presumes a basic equality of opportunity and resources for success, and that the only variable is that of individual merit. However, … all other things are not equal” (p. 52). The social and educational history of Jamaica shows a tendency towards a belief in meritocracy as an engineer of social justice, the efficacy of which is counteracted by social stratification that largely occurs along the lines of skin colour and ethnicity, as well as by the continual efforts of more powerful social groups to keep less powerful groups in their place through the creation and maintenance of inequitable categories of secondary institutions.

Miller (1990) discusses the social history of Jamaican settlement and social mobility as a means for understanding the current social context in which Jamaican secondary schools operate. He notes the traditional dominance of white Englishmen and their lighter-skinned, mixed offspring. In contending that lighter-skinned immigrant groups (e.g. Syrians, Chinese, etc.) were able to raise their social cachet faster than darker-skinned immigrant groups, Miller suggests the prominence of racial theories as a justification for relative social place; he goes on to argue that class-based theories of inferiority merely served as a replacement for racial theories after Independence, when white populations essentially disappeared from the island. These class-based theories of intellectual capabilities still form part of the reason so many Jamaicans today find acceptable the inequities promoted by GSAT and the secondary education system. They imagine the system truly meritocratic and that, if the lower classes were indeed intelligent, they would be able to take better advantage of the opportunities presented them.

In truth, opportunities have been systematically denied the black lower class throughout Jamaica’s history. The 1930’s, a decade of social upheaval in Jamaica, saw constitutional changes being made that allowed blacks political power for the first time. The new suffrage that blacks enjoyed allowed them to agitate for greater educational opportunity. In 1943, the Kandel committee came out with a report on the state of the educational system that supported greater educational opportunities for blacks in light of the new political developments. Kandel made a number of recommendations, but the most influential (for this paper’s purposes) concerned the elimination of class-based education; he advocated for greater opportunities for the elementary school-educated to continue on to secondary studies. In light of this report’s recommendations, the post-primary school was born.

The post-primary school represented an important step forward for lower class mobilization, but were never intended to raise the lower class to the upper class’s level. In fact, the introduction of post-primary schools, which taught mostly vocational and technical subjects, began the system of secondary education stratification that remains in place today. Although further reforms in 1957 implemented the Common Entrance Exam (GSAT’s predecessor) as a mechanism of secondary school placement and opened up more free places in traditional high schools to lower income students through government-awarded scholarships (a tradition that remains in place today), the stratification of education posed significant challenges to income mobility. Post-Independence reforms that focused on educational access (such as those implemented by Michael Manley during the 1970’s) helped to expand the reach of secondary institutions, but also helped to solidify inequities of outcome due to the stratified system.

Present-Day Interventions
Although questions about the equity of educational outcomes are hotly debated in the Jamaican public sphere, with opinions being presented by representatives of all groups, the Jamaican government remains the main initiator of interventions meant to combat the pervasive inequities evident in the Jamaican system of secondary education and the mechanism through which students are placed into public secondary institutions. Successive governments have engaged in various interventions, most of which have been aimed at increasing opportunities for access to public education by historically underprivileged groups, in particular, the members of the lowest socioeconomic classes. I will discuss below both a recently implemented intervention and the disclosed strategies of the newly elected government for fighting inequities in the secondary educational context.

The Reform of Secondary Education Project (ROSE) proceeded from the view held by the then government that individuals had a right to an education that also functioned as a mechanism of social change (King, 1998). According to King, ROSE was designed “to improve both the quality and productivity of education and to achieve greater access and equity in the secondary school systems” (p. 45). It proposed to do so through changing the tradition of separate and unequal curriculum expectations in the various categories of secondary institutions that serve the Jamaican populace. Through loans granted by the World Bank, ROSE intended to create a national curriculum for grades 7-9, so that students who had been assigned to lower-prestige secondary institutions would not be systemically blocked out of opportunities to pursue more advanced studies. The Project ultimately hoped to postpone the age at which students would be assigned to divergent educational tracks from 11+ to 15+ (King). Both the idea of a curriculum common to all secondary institutions and the proposed shift upward in the age of selection represented a large shift away from historical patterns of academic specialization and segregation at the secondary level. ROSE also represented a change in thinking about the manner in which subjects should be taught. Curricula developed recommended a far more student-focused and –friendly approach than had previously been used and paid attention to the attitudes and values espoused by the students along with the traditional foci of the subject matter. To this end, the World Bank loans also included money for limited retraining of teachers to work with the new methodology. Money was also earmarked for the establishment, expansion and maintenance of necessary infrastructure.

Subsequent evaluations of ROSE have found that it has enjoyed some success at meeting its goals, but has fallen short in other areas. Holness (2009) notes that traditional high schools (the most prestigious category of secondary schools) continue to be exempt from the ROSE program, despite the initial goal of linking all secondary institutions under a common curriculum. Other evaluations have pointed out teacher resistance to following, and a potential inability to follow, the student-centric model upon which ROSE is based [see the essays surrounding that of King (1998) for further discussions of ROSE].

More recently, the current Minister of Education, Andrew Holness, has strongly denounced GSAT’s tendency to perpetuate enclaves of social privilege without providing comparable opportunity for social mobility. Proposed alternatives include Bailey’s suggestion of a geographically-based mechanism of placement (with zones intentionally drawn to include both areas of socioeconomic privilege and economically disadvantaged nearby communities). However, similar proposals have formerly been put forward to no avail; many vocal individuals and groups oppose the idea, for a variety of reasons.
In Minister Holness’ July 2009 sectoral debate presentation on the current state of education in Jamaica, he proposed that gains in both access and educational quality are possible through a focus on literacy achievement. Such a statement runs contrary to traditional beliefs, which dictate that gains in one, particularly in a situation where resources are severely limited (as they are in Jamaica), often come at the cost of gains in the other. This mentality has often been cited as the reason for the decline in educational quality following the post-Independence pushes for the expansion of educational access.

Resource List:
Bailey, C. (2005). Creaming and social segregation in the Jamaican school system. IDEAZ, 4(1-2), 61-71.

Francis, P. (2009, June 12). Fix GSAT soon! – Education minister says GSAT causes two-Jamaica syndrome. Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20090612/lead/lead1.html

Holness, A. M. (2009, July). Promoting access and quality in education simultaneously: Sectoral debate presentation. Speech presented at Gordon House, Kingston, Jamaica.

King, R. (1998). Educational inequality in Jamaica: The need for reform. In R. King (Ed.), Institute of education annual: 35th anniversary issue: education and society; teaching and learning in schools; issues and problems in teacher education (pp. 43-58). Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies

Miller, E. (1990). Jamaican society and high schooling. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research.

Ministry of Education. (2006). GSAT brochure. Retrieved on August 9, 2009 from http://www.moec.gov.jm/GSAT%20Brochure.pdf

Ministry of Education. (2008). Ministry paper on the Grade Six Achievement Test. Retrieved on August 9, 2009 from http://www.moe.gov.jm/Final_Ministry_Paper_GSAT_Placement_HME_August_11%5B1%5D%5B1%5D.pdf

Oakes, J. & Lipton, M. (2007). Teaching to change the world (3rd ed.). Boston: McGraw Hill.