High school ranking elitist and unhelpful, says Wright

 

President of the Jamaica Association of Principals and Vice-principals, Linvern Wright, has described the recent ranking of local high schools as elitist, backward and unhelpful.

 

The ranking by Educate Jamaica, which has returned after a five-year hiatus, placed high schools based on 50 per cent of their students passing five Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate (CSEC) subjects with both Mathematics and English.

 

Mr. Wright said Educate Jamaica failed to take into consideration other types of examinations such as City and Guilds as well as Technical and Vocational Education and Training.

 

He believes there should be a push for a narrative-based approach for assessing school performance instead of "colonial" look at education. 

 

According to Mr. Wright, the National Education Inspectorate (NEI) also does school assessments but its analysis is helpful to administrators, teachers and parents. 

 

On the other hand, he argued that Educate Jamaica's assessment is "the most basic analysis you could get because anybody could just take some data and do this kind of thing, then anything can come of it".

 

"We don't need that kind of analysis for where education is in Jamaica now. The kind of analysis we need is thoughtful, where people have done good work with the data and have looked at many different factors to triangulate the data. Very little things have been triagulated in this data and my understanding of research and how it works, this kind of approach to it is something that is 'mashing up' education in Jamaica and we have to do better than that," he complained. 

 

Mr. Wright was speaking Thursday on the Morning Agenda on Power 106.