Pacific Magazine > Magazine > April 17, 2007

Education

Blah, Blah, Blah

Talk Of Reform But Little Action

By By Giff Johnson, MAJURO

At a recent Marshall Islands Chamber of Commerce meeting, a high-level Ministry of Education staffer was asked to offer the gathered business people a brief report on the just-concluded Rethinking Education in the Marshall Islands conference. He replied by referring everyone to a communiqué from the one-week gathering that would appear in the local newspaper later in the week. And therein lies one of the Ministry of Education’s biggest difficulties in addressing what needs to be done to fix the serious problems in the nation’s public education system: it’s hard for
people even at the center of the system to communicate what is being done or needs to be done to reform a system in need of major surgery.

The “rethinking” effort in the Marshall Islands is much needed and long overdue, following on a 2004 Rethinking Education in Micronesia conference. But the results of the weeklong meeting in Majuro were hardly galvanizing. Its major action was to call for expanding the membership of the Rethinking Education Steering Committee “with the responsibility to convene meetings and identify resources and opportunities to come up with specific policies, research and practices necessary to further develop the RMI Human Resource Development Framework.”

Meanwhile, a study on Ebeye Island—the second largest urban center in the Marshall Islands—documented that last year one-in-four students was absent from the main public elementary school every day. In Majuro, outspoken elementary school principal Evelyn Konou at a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored forum on education said bluntly that the reason many elementary age children don’t go to school regularly—or don’t do well when they do attend—is because they are hungry.

Many public school students in the urban areas come to school without eating breakfast and the public schools have no lunch programs, having closed them in the 1990s when U.S. funding expired.

Previous nutrition surveys in Majuro have documented in glaring detail diet deficiencies of young people in the urban centers, with a large percentage of school age students identified as moderately to significantly malnourished.

Konou’s concern sparked the business community to start working with Ministry of Education officials to look at lunch program options. But that was a year ago and the effort seems to have faded away as so many ideas have a way of doing when they hit government bureaucracy.

The Rethinking Conference discussed a new draft strategic plan for the Ministry of Education 2007-2011, and injected suggestions into it. But it strains credulity to believe that this can be more successfully implemented than any of the multitude of previous plans in the absence of some major new developments, such as staffing at the ministry, a demand for change by the public, reform of the hiring and firing system, or promotion of a catchy and easily understood message that stimulates people’s participation in and appreciation of the need for change in direction for public education in the country.