Borrow a leaf from Obama schools plan

Published on 24/10/2010

By Dominic Odipo

Did you see that picture? If a single picture is said to be worth one thousand words, then this one must have been worth at least 1,500!

The President, Vice President and Prime Minister are strolling away from the podium at the Nyayo National Stadium just after the Mashujaa Day celebrations have ended. President Kibaki is in the middle, Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka on his right and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to his left.

Look closely and you will see that the President’s left hand is locked in a tight clasp with the Prime Minister’s right while his right hand hangs loosely next to the V-P’s left hand.

Was this happenstance, accident or were we supposed to read something in those hands? That, though, is not our subject today.

There is an article in the February 1, 2010 issue of the New Yorker magazine, which all our education mandarins, including Education Minister Prof Sam Ongeri, need to read, particularly now when our Form Four students are sitting their national examinations.

Headlined Class Warrior, it is written by Carlo Rotella and focuses on the efforts that Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education, is making to shake up and improve American schools.

According to the article, Obama has allocated Duncan a record US $70 billion in federal economic stimulus funds to hand out to the 50 American states to improve their education levels. But how should this money be shared out?

Duncan, a close friend of the President, has laid out his agenda very clearly. Any state that wants its full share of these stimulus funds needs to give the Department of Education what Duncan calls the “four assurances.”

These states must assure the Department of Education that they will make solid progress in four areas: raising general education standards; recruiting and retaining effective teachers; tracking students’ and teachers’ performance; and in turning around failing schools.

There are, Rotella writes, roughly speaking, two major camps in the fight over education in the United States: free market reformers, who believe that competition, choice and incentives must play a greater part in education and liberal traditionalists who rally around teachers unions and existing schools.

“But Duncan, who argues for linking teachers’ pay to their students’ performance, is firmly on the market forces side. In Chicago, he even experimented with paying students for improving their grades.”

Is there any such high-level, conceptual debate about the future of Kenya’s education system raging in the senior common rooms of our universities or the corridors and high offices at Jogoo House, the ministry headquarters?

There can be no doubt that our education system is crying out for major reforms. Is there anyone within the education system genuinely trying to reform it?

When we were students at Mangu High school so many years ago, we were repeatedly told that we were the best bunch of students in the whole country. We knew that there were some Protestant pretenders across that ridge who claimed the same distinction.

Tracking system

Yet when we arrived at University of Nairobi, the only public university in the country at the time, the difference became obvious.

Scores of students from that other place were routinely discontinued after their first year of study while not a single one from Mangu was discontinued over the three-year period in which we tracked such figures. Why?

That is the sort of question someone from the Ministry of Education should have been asking all those years ago. By now we would have got some answers.

Does the Ministry of Education have any system in place through which it can track a student all the way from Standard One to university and beyond?

How many students get straight As at the Form Four level and then go on to obtain First Class honours degrees from college or university? How many schools are doing better today than they were five years ago? How many effective teachers has the ministry recruited over the last five years? And how can we judge such effectiveness?

Not a joke

These are the sort of questions Duncan and Obama want answered before any further major policy initiatives in the US education sector can be progressed.

What incentives does our Ministry of Education currently award for principals or head teachers who produce top results every other year? What systems has the Ministry put in place to differentiate between those schools which provide their students with a solid, all -round education and those that merely drill them to pass national examinations?

Education, here as in America, is no joke. It is the ultimate dividing line between the haves and have-nots, between those who live longer and those who live short, brutish lives. Let’s pluck a page from Duncan’s book. We need it.

—The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

dominicodipo@yahoo.co.uk>