High Tide
An Innovative Report Card
Why We Must Try Harder
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Our annual innovation feature is usually a pleasure to work on but this year, it has to be said, it was pretty frustrating. Post graduate and adult education initiatives are well represented in the feature. We’re a glass half-full kind of team, so let’s say that it is a long overdue response to some skill shortages in the professions and trades of our nations. But let’s be frank, it also reflects entrenched problems in our primary and secondary schools.
These problems are measurable. Education is one of the Millennium Development Goals—targets agreed to by nations and development agencies to be reached by 2015— and there are indicators that show fairly clearly how we stack up compared to the rest of the developing world. In terms of the six indicators, the Pacific Islands region is on track to meet three—the net enrollment ratio in primary education, proportion of students who complete grade five, and an equal ratio of boys to girls in secondary school.
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To be more specific, in Papua New Guinea, around half of children drop out before grade five. The net enrollment of students in primary education ranges from 74 percent in Papua New Guinea to 100 percent in Tonga. In PNG, the figure is 69 percent for primary aged girls.
Statistics also put the percentage of students who complete primary school at just 31 percent in Nauru.
As we were compiling the list of innovations, it was reported that children were going to school hungry, stealing food from each other, or not turning up to classes at all in the depressed former mining town of Tavua, Fiji.
The Guam Public School System continues to feature in the news for all the wrong reasons. Cash flow problems have plagued the system, meaning payroll deductions to employees’ insurers, lenders and the like have been deferred, and school air-conditioning units have had to be turned off because the GPSS cannot pay its bills.
In the Marshall Islands, as we reported earlier this year, one in four students is absent every day from the main public
elementary school on Ebeye Island. In this issue of Pacific Magazine, you can read about a Marshallese family living in Hawaii because the head of the family believes her children would be better off attending school there than in the Marshall Islands, even as they live in a homeless shelter.
There have been seemingly endless discussions and strategies on what to do on a regional and national basis to improve education. Regionally, Pacific Island governments have discussed harmonization in the education sector across the region, particularly in respect to secondary curricula, exams and a standardized leaving certificate. While this is articulated in the Pacific Plan, it is hard to see how this could work logistically, given that the region’s education systems are based on several different models.
In most Pacific Islands education is still considered the school or the state’s responsibility. But it is not. Schools belong to all of us—to students, parents, extended families, teachers and principales, to every single member of the community, and it is the responsibility of all of us to make sure they are working better. If we want to develop not only nation and community-building skills, but also get an education that can help us and our children operate in the global economy, we need to do better, much better.
Do you know of innovative education programs and initiatives in the region? Let us know by writing to samantham@pacificmagazine.net
