Why do public basic schools perform poorly?
It is an undeniable fact that education is the key to the development of every nation. This explains why literacy rate is one of the key development indexes.
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A nation that has a high literacy rate is often described as developed. In this regard every nation must strive to attain high literacy rates. This is possible provided a nation focuses on having majority of its citizenry going through basic education.
Ghana seems to have made a good attempt when it rolled out the Free Compulsory Basic Education (FCUBE) programme years back. But what has become of it? The policy has not been enforced. Parents who deliberately refuse to send their children to school have not been sanctioned. Even with the introduction of the capitation grant and feeding programme in the public basic schools, the problem of low enrolment is not completely resolved. There have been some improvement in the enrolment rate anyway, but the retention and performance rates have not been good enough. As they progress, many of them drop out before they write the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and after they have written BECE, the performance has been appalling.
In recent times, however, there has been a massive awareness on the part of parents to send their children to school, especially in the urban and peri-urban areas. These days you see parents running helter-skelter sending their children to schools. But guess what? To which schools do they send them? Majority of them send them to private schools. They shy away from the public schools which are supposedly free. Gone are the days when it was only the well-to-do who sent their children to private schools. These days, almost everybody, including the poor, prefers to send their children to private schools. The reason is simple. It is believed that teaching and learning is more effective in private schools than in public schools. The results are there for everybody to see. The quality of public basic schools is fast deteriorating.
Ironically, the public schools have well trained and qualified teachers yet many people have lost confidence in them. Even teachers in the public schools prefer to send their children to private schools where they are not only charged exorbitantly, but their children are taught by teachers who have a lesser qualification. That is what beats me. There are more high calibre teachers in public basic schools than in basic private schools. The teachers in private schools are mostly those without professional qualification. Some are even secondary school leavers. You hardly get a professionally trained teacher in private schools. Yet parents are satisfied with the kind of results they get there. What then is the secret?
One thing is clear. Supervision is very poor in public schools. There are qualified teachers alright, but they do not offer their best. Sometimes, they are in school, but do not do what is expected of them and no one questions them. In most cases, they absent themselves from school with impunity. These are all due to poor supervision.
Often times, people talk of motivation as a factor of poor performance in the public schools. But the problem cannot be attributed to motivation. If you care to know, no matter how private schools motivate their teachers they are not remunerated more than the public school teachers. Generally, teachers in the public schools are paid better than their counterparts in the private schools. Mostly, it is those who fail to secure jobs in public schools who are engaged by private schools. So, how come that they perform better?
Now that the teacher training colleges turn out diploma holders in basic education, one would have thought that performance at the basic level would improve but we are seeing the opposite. It is important for well-meaning Ghanaians to query the system. What at all is wrong with our educational system at that level? Is it that those appointed to head the schools are not competent enough to monitor their own colleagues?
In order to curb the current falling standards in public basic schools, stringent measures need to be put in place by educational authorities to put teachers on their toes. This can be done by strengthening the supervisory roles of those in charge. People appointed to headship positions should be empowered and provided with the necessary incentives to supervise their subordinates.
(Assistant Planning Officer, Tamale Polytechnic) alhassandc@yahoo.com