GSAT is whack* – Jamaica Observer

GSAT is whack* – Jamaica Observer Mobile.

Holness said then that the GSAT, in assigning educational opportunities, was effectively assigning life chances: “Jamaica operates in a Darwinian education system — survival of the brightest — and we have grown accustomed to that… It is in our nature… So GSAT from Common Entrance from selecting the house slaves is just a way of awarding life chances.” And according to Holness, the only way to make the leap from field slave to house slave was to build more schools.

We do believe that the absolute shortage of placement schools must be addressed as a part of any meaningful GSAT review

While the analogy was most unfortunate, the solution was practical and realistic. If we pin the problem with the GSAT to the fact that there is a shortage of schools — June results of the 2011 Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) required fitting 48,000 students into 30,000 spaces in the school term which started in September — then perhaps we can save ourselves $10.3 million (or at least do something nice for our GSAT teachers with it) and then fix the problem for good.

And we wonder too, if parents, instead of negotiating for places in more “desirable” schools, would lend their energy and efforts to the upliftment of the school in which their children were placed what would be the result?

Will there be a meaningful outcome from the very expensive review and report?

In the meantime, it costs about $500 million to build a high school from scratch. The last Government spent almost twice that — $800 million — on a road that is less than a mile long. If the minister of education, the Reverend Ronnie Thwaites, is tenacious enough to convince his Government and the Inter-American Development Bank to spend money on a review of something that has already been reviewed, then perhaps he can use his fund-raising skills to secure financing to build something that really needs to be built.