We would bet that the name Tacius Golding evokes special respect from the leader in residence at Jamaica House - emotion of the type that comes usually from familial relationships.

For Tacius Golding was not only an educator and parliamentarian, but the father of Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who has publicly talked with warmth about his dad's deep commitment to the causes he served.

It is a legacy which, we presume, Mr Golding is keen to preserve and which Jamaica clearly believes is worthy of preservation. After all, the country named a school in honour of Tacius Golding.

So, if for no other reason than familial interest, ensuring that his father's name is carried by an institution of which he is proud, Prime Minister Golding should take on-board, as a matter of urgency, the suggestion of Maxine Henry-Wilson, who, until 18 months ago, was the island's education minister.

"We have to treat this matter (underachievement) as one requiring a declaration of education emergency at the national level, building a real consensus among all stakeholders and using it as a tool of national mobilisation," Mrs Henry-Wilson wrote in Education 2020, a special magazine in this newspaper yesterday.

Special intervention

Among her proposals is identifying the 200 poorest-performing primary schools for special intervention to lift standards in that segment of education that delivers 40 per cent of students still unready for the secondary system. The same idea, we feel, should apply to secondary schools.

Mrs Henry-Wilson's proposal comes in the face of our publication of data on the performance of Jamaican schools in English and math in last year's Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams. Improved even as they are on the previous year's outcomes, these figures make depressing reading. Of the entire grade-11 cohort - all the children who should have been eligible for the exams as opposed to the around 50 per cent who were screened out of the tests - only 31 per cent passed English and 21 per cent math.

But the story is worse for the so-called upgraded high schools, of which Tacius Golding in St Catherine is one. Only four per cent of last year's cohort at upgraded high schools passed math and 11.5 per cent English.

Poor performance

That, however, is not all. Statistician Bill Johnson weighted the examination outcomes for each school, based on the proportion of its cohort that passed the exam and the grades they received to achieve 'quality score', which, at the maximum, is 100. The average in English at the upgraded high schools was 4.3, against 35.4 at the grammar schools.

Tacius Golding's quality score was 0.5. in math and 2.2 in English.

It was, however, not the only school that shamed a famous name. Last year, for instance, we highlighted the poor performance of Claude McKay in Clarendon, named after that famous man of letters. Its quality score in English remained at a paltry 2.7 for math and 1.1 in English.

Mrs Henry-Wilson's state of education emergency will demand tough action, of the kind that business consultant Robert Wynter says Jamaican governments have been reluctant to take. But we remind Mr Golding of his father's name, not of the potential political consequences to which his education minister alluded when they spoke about the school inspectorate system on radio a week ago.

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