Education Director Lionel Sands should have hung his head in shame. Instead, he joined Education Minister Desmond Bannister in a feeble attempt to gloss over the extremely disappointing results of this year’s BGCSE results.
Banister, who is actually doing a good job, is unfortunately swimming upstream trying to clean up the impossible mess that Sands has created during his tenure as Education Director.
Numeorus complaints of sexual abuse by teachers, pathetic test results and a culture of violence in schools is directly due to Sands’ poor management and lax adminsitrative skills.
This years results are really no better than last year’s despite the upbeat presentation by Bannister to the news media yesterday.
Student performance in English language and mathematics continued to decline with students averaging D’s in English and E’s in mathematics.
In fact, there were declines in more than half of the Bahmas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) exam categories.
Bannister tried to put a positive spin on the results, saying that D is an average grade.
“We commend our students’ achievement and wish them continued success in their academic pursuits,” he said.
65 percent of the candidates who sat the English language exam received a D grade or below and 75 percent of students taking the math exam received a D grade or below.
Obviously embarrassed by the results, the ministry only released selected portions of the 2011 BGCSE and Bahamas junior Certificate (BJC) exam results. Last year, it released the entire results reports for both exams.
Each year Sands says that English and Math are the subjects the mministry is most concered about, yet each year the results get worse.
English and the math, “have perennially been problem subjects for us and we have been working very hard to ensure that the problems that we are confronted with, that we deal with them in terms of our instructional programs every year.”
How hard can they really be working?
Of course, the true reason for such dismal test results has to do with lousy parents and incompetent teachers.
Too many Bahamian teachers, some appointed as far back as the corrupt Pindling adminstration, are on the job, doing as little as they can each day to get their paychecks. And a number of foreign teachers are here just to “party”, not really caring about the effectiveness of their teaching methods. After all, they’ll be leaving in a few years, so who cares. Coupled with with the horrid management and adminsitration of Lionel Sand’s little feifdom-like Education Department, it makes for a pathetic situation. Not to say thrre aren’t lots of good teachers, just saying there aren’t enough.
Even if there were an abundance of great teachers, they wouldn’t get anywhere with the multitude of lousy parents that are so common in The Bahamas. Not only are there children, totally unprepared for parenthood, having children, we also have scores of lazy, stupid irresponsible parents spitting out kids like there’s no tommorrow. Had this problem been addressed when it was first noticed years ago, we would not be in the mess we are in today. As it stands now, it is a nearly hopeless battle, with the next generation consisting of swarms of illiterate, criminally-minded little hellions who have no regard whatsoever for human life.
Yeah, good luck with that Bahamas.
