Letter of the Day | Educational apartheid is alive and well in Jamaica

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The reports from Ascot Primary School should trouble anyone who believes school is meant to lift a child rather than rank one. At the Portmore institution’s graduation, Grade Six pupils deemed not “proficient” in this year’s Primary Exit Profile were stripped of the cap and gown, dressed in uniform, marched behind their gowned classmates, and seated at the back. Their parents were offered a cheaper package, as though the children themselves had been discounted.

“Graduation apartheid,” the headlines said. The description fits. But the apartheid did not begin in that tent, and it will not end with the principal’s apology, already dismissed by one parent as hollow.

For a quarter-century, Jamaica has pretended to dismantle this machinery. Common Entrance was abolished in 1999 after the country acknowledged the harm of sorting children in a single morning. GSAT followed, then PEP, promising a fuller profile of the child. Three names, one unbroken architecture. The exam changed; the hierarchy remained.

Ascot’s offence was not aberration but candour. In costume and seating, the school staged what the system does quietly each year. Reports that excluded students were assigned sewing and told to dress as tradespeople only sharpened the message: some are the crème de la crème; the rest must learn their place.

That instinct is old. More than a decade ago, a CAPRI-PREAL report card noted a reluctance to enter weaker students for national exams. The urge to hide the struggling child from public record is longstanding. Ascot simply moved it from exam hall to graduation lawn.

The inequality beneath it is not rhetorical. In 2021, the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission concluded there are effectively two systems: about 42 traditional schools serving mainly the middle and upper classes, and more than 200 non-traditional schools for everyone else. A further tier is so under-resourced that many recorded no CSEC passes. Schools mirror a deeply unequal society.

The commission also punctured the merit myth: a child’s CSEC results can largely be predicted from GSAT scores. Prestige schools tend to inherit achievement. Some elite institutions add less value than their reputations suggest, while certain inner-city and rural schools add more than expected.

Set this beside Ascot. The “proficiency” used to deny gowns reflects where children start as much as effort. In punishing disadvantage and rewarding advantage, the school reproduced the system in miniature.

A graduation marks completion, not rank. Every child who finishes primary school has earned the gown; it belongs to the milestone, not the mark.

If this episode is to matter, let it be more than one reprimand. Let it force us to stop renaming exams and start dismantling the two Jamaicas our own commission describes. Children should not have to wait for a fourth acronym.

Kirkton L. Bennett