FACED WITH growing public pressure for their remuneration to be linked to students' performance, educators are calling for legislation to hold parents accountable for their part in facilitating their children's learning.

"The problem is we have got into a culture in Jamaica where we love to point fingers, and responsibility becomes everybody else's," Nadine Molly, president of the Association of Principals and Vice Principals, argued during a Gleaner Editors' Forum on Wednesday. The discussion focused on accountability in schools.

"The parents have abdicated their responsibilities to the teachers ... I heard the prime minister say there is no way to legislate parenting, but there is a way and there must be a way," she added.

Molly said the situation has been frustrating teachers, and has called on parents to more carefully monitor their children. She recommended that Government look at models in other countries such as Cuba.

" (At) every PTA meeting, we talk about homework, but they still come back to school without homework (completed)," Molly said.

"I know what my colleagues are doing and I know what we put into many of our schools in Jamaica and we see it falling flat because we don't have the buy-in from the community," she stated.

Concerns

Marinade Sutherland, president of the National Parent Teachers Association of Jamaica (NPTAJ), shared Molly's observation and noted that a new National Parenting Commission Act is to be tabled in Parliament that will address some of the teachers concerns. The bill is still in its draft phase and has been sent to other agencies and ministries for comment, but is expected to reach Parliament by March.

The NPTAJ, Sutherland said, has been conducting training workshops with some parents in the meantime to help develop their parenting skills.

However, management consultant Robert Wynter disagreed with any proposed legislation to hold parents accountable for the children's actions, saying it would solve nothing.

"Legislation solves nothing. There are a lot of laws against murder and we still have 1,600 murders annually," he argued.

Wynter questioned the extent to which educators held themselves accountable for the output of their students, suggesting that governing bodies were not doing enough to hold teachers accountable for poor performance in the classroom.

Teachers performing

But president of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), Doran Dixon, quickly rose to educators' defence, arguing that most teachers were performing effectively and creditably. He said teachers could not be blamed for their students' poor performance if the minimum standards were not in place to allow children to learn effectively.

"I don't know if it is reasonable (to say) the performance of our members have been low," Dixon said in rejecting Winter's view. "What we have is if you get children who are maladjusted for all different kind of reasons, and you are able to take that individual from being illiterate to a point where the person is functional, there is some degree of success," the JTA president argued.