Editorial | What Port Antonio Primary has to teach

Based on her claims, Principal Kennecha Davis-Williams is getting something right at the Port Antonio Primary School in Portland that merits the attention of the education minister, Dr Dana Morris Dixon.

Boys at the school, this newspaper reported last week, are beginning to equal and, in some cases, outperform girls. The greater underperformance of boys in Jamaica’s already underperforming education system is a matter with which Dr Morris Dixon has been grappling.

So, if the reported results at Port Antonio Primary are not statistical blips or misinterpreted aberrations, but the genuine outcome of initiatives that Ms Davis-Williams has put in place, then it is the kind of project that might be scaled up and adopted and adapted to other schools. On its face, the idea seems quite simple: place boys in separate classes and gear their teaching to how boys learn.

Of the nearly 32,000 students (15,964 boys and 15,842 girls) who sat this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams, which test the readiness of the island’s Grade Six students for secondary education, 69 per cent were deemed proficient in mathematics and 72 per cent in language arts. These are considered the core subjects in Jamaica’s primary and secondary education systems.

The outcomes, according to education ministry data, represent improvements of 12 percentage points each over four years. But the figures also mean that 31 per cent of students didn’t meet the expected performance standards in maths, and 28 per cent in language arts. Additionally, on average, after six years of primary school, around eight per cent of students were at the beginners’ stage in either subject.

However, the PEP performance was not even across genders. For instance, in language arts, there was a near 17 per cent performance gap between the girls and boys. That is, 80.2 per cent of female students met the proficient standard in the subject, against 63.5 per cent for boys. In maths, where girls struggled more with the subject than they did with language arts (73.2 per cent were proficient), their performance advantage over boys was 8.3 percentage points. Sixty-four-point-nine per cent of boys were proficient in the subject.

EDUCATION CRISIS

Clearly, Jamaica has an education crisis across genders. But, as the disaggregated data show (and not merely at the primary level), the problem is deeper among males.

In June, at the unveiling of the PEP results, Dr Morris Dixon said that her ministry would establish a committee to examine the gender performance gap and the efforts of some institutions to close the disparities and to see what has worked.

“There are some schools that have separated the boys from the girls at Grade Six and put them in different classes, and they’ve seen performances improve,” she said. “... So, there’s some data that we’re looking at in terms of what schools have tried.”

This newspaper continues to insist that the basics of reading and writing, and doing sums at the students’ age and grade level, must be the fundamental mission of Jamaica’s primary schools. These are the critical foundations of education.

In that regard, The Gleaner endorses the education ministry’s introduction of reading as a specific element in the curriculum of primary schools. We are encouraged, too, by significant gains in reading and general education performances in schools such as Denham Town High and Holy Trinity High, by their employment of remedial, though in each case different, reading and teacher-training techniques. The education ministry must aggressively review what works, and can be efficiently and cost-effectively scaled across the education system.

Which means that what Principal Davis-Williams is doing at Port Antonio Primary should also be on the agenda, including the simultaneous operation of co-educational and all-boys classes in some grades.

RESPONDED BETTER

Based on teachers’ observations from the last academic year, Ms Davis-Williams said, some boys responded better in the educational environment when grouped with other boys.

There are ample studies globally of the earlier intellectual development of girls and the different stimuli for learning between males and females, which tend to give girls an advantage in the early phases of education. It is not clear if, based on available scientific evaluations, or how, this plays out in Jamaica’s classrooms.

However, Ms Davis-Williams said: “Over the years that we have been looking at the data … we realise that the lower-performing students were males. In every single subject, the boys performed way below the girls.”

Something, however, has changed. “When you look at our current Grade Four data, our boys, based on what we are trying to put in place, are performing at pretty much the same level as the girls.”

Notably, last year 13 (65 per cent) of Port Antonio Primary’s top 20 students were boys. Insofar as this indicates a turnaround, it is worthy of celebration and, what produced it, replication.

However, focusing on boys mustn’t mean ignoring the problems faced by girls that lead to education deficits among females. It can’t be one or the other.