The Editor, Sir:

You continue to dismiss as unimportant, one of the fundamental problems in our high-school system. In your editorial on April 14, you write: "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." The skewed feeder system is the most fundamental problem that the school system faces now. I hope that, if the new JTA president should demand an end to it, your newspaper will join in a campaign to change it.

Your newspaper continues to promote very superficial analyses of exam results which, unfortunately, are being widely regarded as some sort of standard assessment of schools.

Results consistent

A basic knowledge of probability and statistics tells us that when the results in some schools are consistent, from a narrow range, the cohort does not represent a random sample and it is likely that they reflect some form of streaming. When results show a given, unchanging pattern over a long period it is far more likely that they are produced by something systemic, like a skewed feeder system. When you look at the range in each school, one of the things you will discover is that there is very little difference among the results of the top students in most of the schools. The top two performers in the CSEC this past year came from Manchester High and Edwin Allen, two schools that did not feature on The Gleaner's top-10 chart.

I know that Mr Stewart is from one of the schools that suffers from this idiotic system. Porus is one of the schools where the students from Mandeville with lower GSAT grades are sent, and the brighter children from Porus are sent to schools in Mandeville. Yet, I can remember students who have done well enough at Porus to gain entrance to the sixth form at Manchester High, which shows that they have outperformed many of those who went to the schools in Mandeville. It also shows that there is no need to send a child from Porus all the way to Mandeville to get an education. We must stop doing that.

Stop insulating schools

We must stop insulating some schools from the weaker students who live close to them, allowing them to hide behind bright students from all over the country, and place the responsibility for educating the weaker ones on the shoulders of some teachers three taxi routes away. Somebody should be held accountable for the extent to which students in the communities around schools have access to them.

I hope that Mr Stewart puts that at the top of his agenda.

I am, etc.,

R. Howard Thompson

roi_anne@hotmail.com

Munro College, St Elizabeth