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JTA President Owen Speid - file photo
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Owen Speid
The Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) says Prime Minister Andrew Holness should provide data to support his comment last week that some schools are operating as mere daycare centres or issue a retraction.
JTA President Owen Speid has taken umbrage to the comment, describing it as irresponsible.
Speaking at the launch of the Education Transformation Commission, Mr. Holness said while some may take offence to the comment, the truth was that there is no education taking place at some institutions.
He said the problem needs to be urgently corrected.
But the JTA president says data from this year's National Education Inspectorate Report do not support the prime minister's comments.
"The last National Education Inspectorate Report...that was published on January 25 this year, revealed that primary and secondary schools in particular showed massive improvement in all eight areas under consideration. And so that is going contrary to what the Prime Minister has said."
Mr. Speid said the suggested shortcomings of the schools also reflect poorly on Mr. Holness's stewardship as a former education minister.
"The Prime Minister has gotten two stints as Minister of Education and if he has gotten two stints as Minister of Education and...if he knew all along that schools were operating as daycare centres and he did nothing about it, then it is going straight to his leadership as well," the JTA president argued.
Mr. Speid made it clear that the JTA is not against improving the education system. However, he said resource deficiencies are a major impediment in some schools.
"The truth is that we need to understand that if you have no resources or very little resources, when you walk into the schools and you look there, you'll see that there are not even many specialist teachers to guide the process of assessing the students, diagnosing the students who have learning deficiencies, and I can tell you that you cannot put that down at the foot of the teachers," he said.
He argued that teachers "can do so much and no more" when faced with a situation in which perhaps one in four students has a learning deficiency.
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