Tobago students the worst in the nation? Pt II
By Dr. Winford James
October 10, 2004
Posted: October 15, 2004
In the last column (read it on the website trinicenter.com), I compared the performance of students from Tobago in the 2004 Secondary Entrance exams with that of students from Trinidad, treating the results for both sets of students as separate wholes. I distributed both sets of results across seven groups or columns of marks (0-29; 30-59; 60-89; 90-119; 120-149; 150-179; and 180-212) and showed that there was a better distribution of the Tobagonians across the groups of marks. (The data I used was arranged by Bobby Andrews, a researcher in the Policy Research and Development Institute of the Tobago House of Assembly.)
More specifically, I showed that there were proportionately more Tobagonians in the middle columns (60-89; 90-119; 120-149) but more Trinidadians in the lower columns (0-29; 30-59) and the higher columns (150-179; 180-212). In particular, in the last column, there were 18.3% of the Trinidadians against 7.7% of the Tobagonians, which means that the Trinidadians outscored the Tobagonians in that column by a whopping 10%!
In brief, the Tobagonians scored better in the first five columns, the Trinidadians scored better in the last two, but the latter were significantly better proportionately where the highest group of marks is concerned.
I don't know that these results (and similar ones over the years) suggest that Tobagonians are performing worse than Trinidadians in the Secondary Entrance exams. One of the critical things they show, however, is that more Tobagonians need to be excelling in the exams, that is, to locate themselves in the highest columns of marks.
Now the analyses of the Ministry of Education will not reveal the findings above since they use the mean or average of the marks nationally and then locate students in the eight educational districts in relation to that mean / average. If, as is the case, there are more Trinidadians than Tobagonians scoring in the highest column of marks (as revealed by Bobby Andrews' analysis), then it is likely that that fact will produce a mean that will make it look as if Tobagonians are performing worse than Trinidadians (it has!). And, perniciously, it will prevent the educational planners and policy makers from paying focused attention to, among other things, (1) the fact that Tobagonians are doing comparatively well but not excelling and (2) the fact that many Trinidadians - perhaps a majority - are doing poorly in the primary system.
The Ministry's way of analysing masks one of the really tragic social realities in the nation, but particularly in Trinidad. Trinidad, largely because of the way opportunity - educational, economic, and occupational - has been structured to benefit a few privileged groups, has been a society in which a highly visible few do exceedingly well at every level of the educational process, even by international standards as we see in the results of the A level exams, and that kind of success is focused on and praised to such an extent that it clouds the failure, sometimes the abysmal failure, of many students.
I admit that the success of the brilliant few shows the potential of the nation in general and the education system in particular, but I submit that it is no reflection that the education system is serving our general student body well. We need to ask ourselves how many of our students are doing poorly even as the privileged few do brilliantly. And we need research and analyses that would motivate us to focus on the various kinds of interventions that must be made in the interest of the majority of students.
In the case of Tobago, Andrews' analysis tells us that there must be policy interventions with the goal of having more Tobagonians excel in the primary system.
It seems to me that the reason why Tobagonians are not excelling in the same proportions as Trinidadians is not that they are less smart or that the teachers are less competent or professional. After all, the research tells us every blinking day that people everywhere have the same potential for excellence once the social and political conditions are right, and the teachers in Tobago are trained by the same institutions as those in Trinidad.
I suspect that the answer lies in differentiated qualities of social and political conditions in the two islands, but we need the right analyses of phenomena like SEA results, and we certainly need far more research of our realities than we do at the present time.
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