Learners have right to good schools

There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.–? Marva Collins, American educator.

A section of the media published a report in which the Ministry of Education was faulted for allowing children with comparatively lower marks to be allowed to join prestigious high schools.

Truth be told, scoring low marks does not mean that the students are not educable. Every child has inborn abilities that society and formal schooling is obligated to nurture.

As the Education Principal Secretary Belio Kipsang indicated in the report in question, scoring low marks in KCPE may be due to varied reasons.

The teaching and learning environments of our primary schools are not similar.

The factors that dispose pupils to learning are as varied as the over 20,000 primary schools we have across the country. Some environments are supportive to learning while others are inhibitive.

The marks children from hostile learning environments get may in fact not be the true measure of their cognitive potential.

We should not write them off! There is negligible difference between the brain power of the pupils who attend poorly endowed schools and those who attend elite schools.

Both children could in fact be having similar brain power, but because of the disadvantaged socio-economic and cultural background, they end up scoring differently in the KCPE examinations.

The child who scores comparatively lower marks in KCPE is entitled to the extraordinary schools which have created intense cultures of achievement.

They also deserve extraordinary teachers to inspire them to transform their lives and their expectations of life.

They too, have dreams they want to sublimate through quality secondary educational such schools provide.

According to the Director of Secondary and Tertiary Education, Mr Robert Masese, KCPE results are not a reliable predictor of high achievement in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education.

“It is not always the students who celebrate at KCPE who celebrate at KCSE,” Mr Masese, who was a long serving Principal of Nairobi School argues.

Masese says that students who join High school with comparatively low marks from disadvantaged learning environments do well in High School.

Mr Masese contends that the environment has a lot of influence on learning outcomes.

A friendly and supportive environment leads to excellent learning outcomes and an unfriendly and hostile one leads to, depending on the gravity of the unfriendly and hostilities, modest or dismal learning outcomes.

Pupils who got lower marks and were admitted in schools that have demonstrated capacity to develop student’s cognitive, non-cognitive and transferable skills are in fact not a liability to the school.

They call on the teachers and the Principals to demonstrate one basic principle of education: that putting effective teachers and transformative principals in front of learners makes a difference in the learning outcomes of the learners and that brain power without the inspiration, coaching, and mentorship of highly motivated teachers and transformative school leaders amounts no nothing.

What is perhaps critical is for the school to take stock of the entry behaviours of the students in order to identify key areas that need to be covered and the areas of knowledge the student already possess.

It helps the school to adopt appropriate pedagogical strategies that facilitate the development of every learner—regardless of the educational experience in primary education.

In a Speech entitled 21st Century Schools for a 21st Century Economy, US President Barack Obama observed: “From the moment our children step into a classroom, new evidence shows that the single most important factor in determining their achievement today is not the colour of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have, It’s who their teacher is.”

It’s the person who will brave some of the most difficult schools, the most challenging children, and accept the most meagre compensation simply to give someone else the chance to succeed.

One study shows that two groups of students who started third grade at about the same level of math achievement finished fifth grade at vastly different levels.

The group with the effective teacher saw their scores rise by nearly 25 percent. The group with the ineffective teacher actually saw their scores drop by 25 percent.”

The kids who scored less than 300 could in fact have scored well over 390 had it not been for the “difficult learning environments” that defined their primary education experience. They are looking forward to see their scores rise by over 25 per cent!

This is because some of them hailed from dysfunctional teaching and learning environments.

It is the job of the high school to develop them; Schools should embrace rather than label the students nonstarters.