Social Crisis in Public Education in The Bahamas

The Social and Political Challenges of  Virtual Education in The Bahamas Public School System

8,000 students inactive on the virtual learning platform throughout the COVID-19 pandemic!

Social Crisis in Public Virtual Education in The Bahamas as CoViD19 Rages

NASSAU, BAHAMAS —  An education recovery task force has been established and will have just 14 days to track down some 8,000 students who were inactive on the virtual learning platform throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Minister of Education Glenys Hanna-Martin.

Hanna-Martin’s comments came as schools reopen fully virtual for the New Year, with the expected hybrid model postponed for two weeks due to the recent spike in COVID-19 cases.

She insisted that the task force is a multiagency public-private sector, who started their efforts on Monday with a walkabout in the Kemp Road area which was to raise awareness.

“This task force which will meet again tomorrow will look nationwide as to where there is a situation or phenomenon of children not attending school, some of them for as much as two years,” Hanna-Martin said.

 

“It’s a two-phased effort. Firstly we are going to find them. We have committed to finding every child wherever they are…We are going into the communities, we will find these children through telephone calls and direct contact.”

 

She noted that the second phase will be a diagnostic review of the student to understand the extent of the impact of them being out of school.

“We will devise acceleration programs so that these children in the shortest possible time can reestablish their positioning age-appropriate of where they should be educationally wise,” Hanna-Martin said.

The education minister said today’s meeting with the task force will be to design specific strategies to find these students within 14-days and to put in place goals and an action plan once they have been found.

“We don’t know the reasons why every child has been out of school,” she added.

“One situation may require different interventions. There may be more expanded issues. We will be in the business now of just trying to understand fully what’s happening to that child and see how that child can be supported in being reintegrated into an education program”.

Source 

Waiting for Superman: Can the US and the Caribbean save its educational system?

By Rebecca Theodore:


At a time when a cheerless wind chills the mist and gathering swallows twitter in the approaching dusk, the International Film Festival ushers in an appropriate opening to the beginning of a solemn first day of film and harvest in Toronto.

In high-heeled shoes that pinched, I sat tense and earnest, overwhelmed in the shadows of standing ovations at the Winter Garden Theatre, eyes soaked in tears, infinitesimal in the company of automatic enthusiasts, and birthing reformist. Looking back, I saw myself walking down memory lane in the corridors of Bense Primary school in my beloved island home of Dominica. I saw a multitude of US and Caribbean kids full of dreams, hopes and aspiration…. I had seen the opening of the film ‘Waiting For Superman.’

Davis Guggenheim’s look at what’s wrong with the educational system was not only a wake up call to the problems children face from kindergarten to high school in the US and what is needed to fix it but also a plea to education ministers in the Caribbean letting them know that education is crucial to development and a basic requirement for achieving genuine equal opportunity in a competitive world.

In reminding us that education "statistics" have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of Waiting For Superman, Guggenheim follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, as he undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying "drop-out factories" and "academic sinkholes," methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.

Guggenheim pulls no punches as he makes the point over and over again that bad teachers must be eliminated from schools and replaced with good ones. His archenemy is the teachers’ unions which oppose evaluation of teachers, and the firing of poor teachers.

It is evident that Guggenheim’s film depicts the time has come for a review of the education system not only in the US but also in the Caribbean to better cater to the needs of children, who are faced with increasing challenges because there is a disconnect between children and teaching.

In this regard, Waiting for Superman provides a rethink of the education system from early childhood all the way up to tertiary level. Ironically enough, the same day the movie premiered, the first round of educational grants to states for Obama's Race to the Top program were announced and the government of Trinidad and Tobago allocated the largest slice of the 2010/2011 national budget -- $8 billion to the training sector.

These are worthy footprints for the remainder of other Caribbean islands to follow for the film has made it apparent that US and Caribbean kids are entering an unfriendly labor market without appropriate qualifications, thus increasing their prospects of long term unemployment, poverty and crime.

Even though it is perceived by many that the education system in the Caribbean evolved from a colonial historical legacy which was predicated on privilege; education should no longer serve as a primary device for social selection and class stratification because the attainment of independence and the growth of nationalism, has limited the effects of a socio-political priority and Caribbean education is no longer modeled on the British school system. Therefore, changes to the education system will equip Caribbean schools to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

It is clear that Guggenheim has done what artists are supposed to do in trying to understand this problem. In propelling people to be outraged in his outstanding cinematography, he has disturbed the social order in demanding that schools in America and also the Caribbean are great for every kid. Educational opportunities should not be determined by playing a bingo card to get a good education. There is a chance to be won in having a future in the world by breaking the code on how kids are educated.

September 13, 2010

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