Miseducated

Comprehensive Education Review Team preparing report for Government. I learned quite by accident that there is a Comprehensive Education Review Team. They are examining the state of comprehensive education in Anguilla. They are interviewing people, and examining the facilities at the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School. They will prepare a report for government. I was grateful to the Team for giving me an opportunity recently to address them. I offered them my views on Anguilla’s secondary school education system. I told them exactly what I think. This, in summary, is what I said:

Based on my exposure to Anguilla’s sole high school, in my estimation fewer that 20% of this year’s Form VI graduates will enter the work force, or go on to an institution of tertiary education, able to either write, or to express themselves verbally, anywhere near a Form VI standard. The exceptions are all the children of professionals. I assume their parents put pressure on them to achieve and to excel in school. Those children who do not come from equally ambitious backgrounds are not being helped by the present school system. I had not realised that the Comprehensive Education System, as it works in Anguilla, is designed to ensure that only the children who are the beneficiaries of additional home schooling would reach an acceptable standard of basic education on graduation from the High School.

I am conscious that the secondary school system is not the only, or even the main, culprit in this failure shown towards the students of Anguilla. I understand that the children’s education problems start long before they reach the High School. It is unfair to expect the High School staff to overcome by themselves, and without resources, the obstacles placed in the way of the education of our young people. They are the result of wider social problems.

Parents, who were too busy to read to them when they were very young, are partly to blame.

The primary schools are graduating students who cannot read or write.

Most Anguillian school children are latch-key children. There is frequently no adult present when the students come home after class to encourage them to study and prepare. Too often, the only real family is the neighbourhood gang.

Drugs, alcohol and pornography on the internet are pervasive. These adversely impact young persons in Anguilla when they are left to their own devices.

The paucity of the facilities at the High School is noticeable. The school library serves as the Form VI students’ lounge. The books are in the mess you would expect. I have not asked, but it is unlikely that any student, other than a sixth former, would dare to enter the school library.

The public library is no substitute. It is a place for students to go to gossip and to play computer games. The different reading rooms in the library are not invigilated when there are students in them, as they ought to be. The public library of Anguilla is distinguished mainly by the absence of worthwhile literature and reference works. There has been no attempt to build up a permanent collection of regional and international classics. There has for years been a culture among the public library staff that if a book is old then it must be deemed soiled and fit only to be disposed of. Anguillian children are too precious to be made to handle a used book. Several of my students have told me that they have not borrowed a book from the public library to read for either pleasure or instruction in over ten years. Their explanation is that there are no books worth reading in the public library.

There is no invigilated study room in the school, as there ought to be, for students who have no class to sit quietly and study. The result is that there are groups of boys and girls hiding in corners of the schoolyard laughing and chatting at all hours of the day.

There is no supervision of the students in the school yard during breaks or at lunch time. I understand the Teachers’ Union is opposed to it. I have not asked Emma if it is true. This abandonment of the students encourages them to engage in bad behaviour. It reinforces their perception that there are no consequences for bad behaviour. Foul language on the school grounds is commonly overheard, among boys and girls. There is no one to report their misconduct.

Even if anyone did report unacceptable behaviour, there is in practice no penalty of any consequence. There is, eg, no invigilated room for misbehaving children to be made to stay back after school in punishment. Class control is not managed by rules or procedures, but by the force of the individual teacher’s character. Teachers do their work in terror of some abusive parent storming into the school and assaulting them.

Many of the teachers I meet are disillusioned and disgruntled. The teacher’s common room is a dump. I have never seen more than five or six teachers in it at lunch time or at any other time, except when the Principal holds briefing meetings. The explanation I have been given for its present dilapidated state is that it is old, about to be replaced, and not worth repainting.

In my humble opinion, there is no necessity for the education authorities to compound all the wider social faults and defects in Anguilla by providing an education system that seems designed to ensure that the present generation of Anguillian students will not be able to hold their own when they grow up and go out into the real world.

In my humble opinion, the comprehensive education system of Anguilla, as I have found it, is a major disappointment. Anguilla’s children are being cheated out of a decent secondary education. A majority of Anguillian students leave the ALHCS essentially uneducated. Radical reform is needed. I am not qualified to make recommendations on how to reform the system. I will leave that for others who are more qualified than I am.

I was pressed by the team at the end of the interview to find something positive to say about the system. I got the impression they wanted a balanced opinion from me. Sorry, I don’t do balanced opinions. I am only capable of delivering frank opinions. Let the mealy-mouthed equivocators produce the balanced opinions. Anguilla has more than its fair share of those types. There will be plenty of apologists to pick and choose from. In my mind, the situation is stark, and crystal clear.

Parents, schools, and students of the 1960s and 1970s had fewer resources than those of today. Yet, the students left the education system highly educated. They left both disciplined and highly motivated. Those were the Anguillians who built the Anguilla of today that we know. The principal of the school and her team face an impossible task in producing replacements who will be equally highly educated and motivated. The existing secondary school system has totally failed the majority of the present-day graduates. Most modern-day Anguillian High School graduates are not qualified to go on to college. They are not even fit to fill the position of junior clerk in any office. They are essentially illiterate and unemployable. Except for my students, of course.

Sorry if it sounds too harsh a judgment. I tried hard, but I could not find anything more positive to say.

Monitoring

School Violence Monitor. The Report of the Task Force on School Violence is now some two weeks old. We in Anguilla are concerned to learn what the Ministry's response is.

Has every manager in the Ministry of Education read it?

Have they given their advice to the Minister?

Have they urged him to accept the Report, or has it been rejected?

Has the Minister tasked anyone to put together the Ministry's response?

Or, will the Report just be allowed to die from neglect. That, after all, is what happened to the School Violence Committee Report of 2005.

No doubt, it was in an effort to prevent this outcome that the Task Force made its first recommendation. This reads:

“Immediate Action:

1. Form a committee, or identify an individual, that is responsible for monitoring and reporting on the progress of implementing these recommendations.”

Anyone who is exposed to our High School knows that in recent years we have lost a lot of students due to the present neglectful system. Without the implementation of a new policy of prevention, education and treatment in the areas of drug and alcohol use, conflict resolution and sex education, continuing generations of our students will be lost.

I would suggest that what the Minister has to do is to twist arms, berate his staff, until results appear. They must find the right person for the job. They must provide the appropriate resources. There is no need for any more committees. The period for hand-wringing and hair-pulling over the state of our secondary education system must be declared ended. This is the time for firm action.

The Report provides a plan of action.

Now, we need a School Violence Tsar to monitor and report on how well the Department is implementing it.

School Drugs

A total of 72% of Anguillian High School students feel that illegal drug use at school is a “serious” to “very serious” problem. That is the conclusion of the 2009 Report from the Task Force on School Violence. The Report was published at page 3 of the 27 March 2009 issue of The Anguillian Newspaper.

Anguilla has one secondary school: The Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School. So, we are simultaneously speaking about one secondary school and we are also speaking about the entire secondary school system, from Form 3 and upwards.

The figure of 72% relates to those students who feel that illegal drug use is either a serious problem or a very serious problem. If we knew the percentage of students at the school who feel that drug use at the school is merely a problem that figure would dramatically increase. I would expect the figure to be 100% of the students. A student would have to be blind, naïve, and willing to stand mute of malice to feel otherwise. That is my opinion, anyway.

Note that this figure of 72% is not a calculation relating to illicit drug use in the society in general. It is not a percentage of students who feel that students use illicit drugs at home or on the street. This percentage relates to drug use at school. That is, use of illicit drugs within the surrounding walls of the school itself. Students must daily come across activities or sights that cause them to express such concern. They must regularly witness incidents of drug selling, drug use, and the visible effects of drugs' use among their peers at school, to cause them to express such near-unanimous concern.

The Report recommends a number of simple and positive steps that can be taken to improve the situation at the school. These include:

“2. Dramatically increase adult supervision at the school. It should not be an option for teachers to supervise the students, but an assigned duty. In addition, many parents who returned surveys indicated their willingness to help monitor and supervise at the school. Adult supervision is not just for enforcement; it can also offer many opportunities for positive interactions and good role modeling. This increased adult presence, along with a policy of assigning study halls during free time, will help ensure that there are no unsupervised students wandering the campus during class time.

3. An effective Drug and Alcohol policy needs to be created and enacted. There are many examples of these policies available. The new policy must address prevention, education and treatment. It must also have a provision for drug testing on campus. This process should be coordinated with other departments such as Judicial and Police.”

The cost of implementing these recommendations would be minimal. We do not have to re-invent the wheel all over again. There are many examples of programmes for monitoring illicit drug use in schools and educating students on the effects and implications of drug use available. A perfunctory Google search produced an avalanche of links.

Help can be obtained from the US Department of Educations' Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools programme.

Or, what about the web site of the Student Drug Testing Coalition website?

There are UNESCO programmes we can draw upon.

There is an Australian initiative we can look at.

There are journals on school drug education we can subscribe to, or at least read.

And, these are a small sample of what is available for anyone who is really interested in dealing with our High School drugs-problem in Anguilla.

For those of us interested in transparency, openness and good governance, I regret to report that a copy of the Report is not yet up on the government website. There is only the briefest of mentions on The Anguillian Newspaper website. A pity. The Report would have been more useful than many of the present offerings on view on both sites.