For example, for the fiscal year that ended March 31, the Government allocated nearly $64 billion to the education sector, or around 12.5 per cent of the total expenditure for the year. However, when the $268.25 billion, which has first call on the Budget, is removed, education got close to 27 per cent of what remains.
The situation is not much different with the expenditure estimates that Finance Minister Audley Shaw tabled in Parliament last week for the fiscal year that started on April 1. He earmarked a little over $71 billion for education, or 13 per cent of the overall Budget. The sector, however, will account for 30 per cent of non-debt expenditure. Approximately $47 billion, or two-thirds of the education budget, will be paid on wages and salaries, extras such as subsistence and travel expenses.
Arguments about what - in the best of circumstances - would be the ideal amount to spend on education notwithstanding, these are not figures on which even the most hard-line activist of the education establishment would claim that Jamaica gets good returns.
Poor performances
Indeed, the performance by Jamaican students in math and English at the CSEC exams underlines this point. Forty-three per cent of the entire grade-11 cohort was excluded from the exam in English; for math, the exclusion rate was 52 per cent. Of the total cohort, only 31 per cent passed the English exam, and 21 per cent at math.
But for the so-called upgraded high schools, the pass rate for the cohort in math is four per cent and 11.5 per cent in English. The numbers were only marginally better for the technical high schools and uneven among the traditional grammar schools. Even when judged on the basis of those who actually wrote the exam, the pass rate for math among upgraded high school students was 21 per cent and 36 per cent for English.
The poor education outcomes are common at the primary and pre-primary levels, and point to a crisis that is in need of urgent and broad-based attention, including, we insist, the need for accountability. Indeed, this newspaper believes that performance-based pay for teachers is a feasible method by which to hold teachers accountable for outcomes, notwithstanding the intransigence of their union, the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA).
But perchance that the authorities cannot at this time persuade the JTA to accept this broad process of accountability, they might get a buy-in at the level of school leadership. The principal, or head teacher, is after all congruent to the CEO of a firm, who should want to be seen as such as being judged by similar standards, not least performance.
Perhaps, therefore, it is time to change the employment arrangements of school principals, moving from open-ended schemes to fixed-term contracts with specific performance targets. Salaries and bonuses would be tied to outcomes. We cannot contemplate head teachers or the JTA rejecting such a scheme.
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