It is another four months or so before Michael Stewart formally assumes the presidency of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA). It is unfortunate that it won't be sooner.

Nonetheless, Mr Stewart, if he fully comprehends and grasps it, has a grand opportunity to resuscitate the JTA and make a fundamental contribution to the progress of education in Jamaica. He needs to start his work now.

The first order of business in this regard is for Mr Stewart to accept that the JTA, as an organisation, has long run aground and has become intellectually encrusted. Only, it has grown worse under the current leadership. Then, he must want to do something about it; to pull the organisation into dry docks and peel away the barnacles.

Our recommendation to Mr Stewart, therefore, is to begin to articulate - with a clarity that the JTA has not demonstrated in recent years to be within its capacity - positions on education reform that will affect outcomes for the better. He should start with an area that is obviously in need of action and where he will find great support in the wider community: accountability and performance from those who manage schools.

No single solution

Of course, Mr Stewart, currently the principal of the Porus High School, will note that the problems of Jamaican schools stem from no single source and have no single solution. But he would agree that the Jamaican taxpayer does not get nearly adequate return on his investment in education. And Mr Stewart, even as he argues for broad interventions and a 'holistic' approach to education reform, will embrace the idea that leadership matters: that outcomes improve when people are held accountable.

Mr Stewart knows the numbers, but they bear repeating to underline the necessity to wring better results from what, as a country, we pay for education. In the past fiscal year, the Government allocated 12.5 per cent of the national budget, but, excluding what was spent on servicing the debt, the expenditure was 27 per cent of the budget. For the new fiscal year, the budget for education is $71 billion or 13 per cent of planned spending, but that rises to 30 per cent of the non-debt portion of the budget.

Literacy and numeracy

Yet, each year, school managers deem that over half the grade 11 cohort is not ready to write math in the regional secondary schools exams, while over 40 per cent is excluded from the English exam. Even with the exclusions, only 54 per cent passed English last year and 43 per cent math. Up to a third enter high school without full mastery of the basics in literacy and numeracy.

Those who lead in schools cannot assume that such performances are given and hide behind the unevenness of resources available to schools, or that the skewed feeder system gives certain schools the 'best' students. And it can't be, as Mr Deron Dixon, the JTA's current president implies, that there can be no holding of heads accountable until there is full parity in the system.

Leadership in schools ought to be an end in itself; it is neither decoration nor reward for long-service but a job, like the chief executive officers of other institutions, from which performance is expected and for which the holder is held accountable. One way to start to achieve this is by hiring principals on fixed-term contracts.

This ought to be Mr Stewart's first proposal on his mission to reform.

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