Sack all public basic school teachers and start afresh

Stephen Adei (Ph.D.), Emeritus Professor

Former Director-General and Rector of GIMPA, Professor Stephen Adei, says his revolutionary strategy to transforming the poor performance of public basic schools in Ghana is to simply sack all the teaching staff.

He noted that the lack of active supervision in public basic schools have resulted in highly qualified teachers not pulling their weight to ensure that students excel in their various subjects.

According to him, no matter how much money government pumps into public basic school education to improve the sector, if the structure of management and accountability in the schools does not change, “every money is going down the drain.”

“First of all, we have allowed the quality of our basic education to collapse in the public sector. It’s so sad. The teachers are not teaching. They’re qualified, far more qualified than we were – because mine was you first start serving and then you go for four years. These days they’re almost all graduates.

“I hear that from today, there will be no pupil teachers teaching. We were having pupil teachers teaching alongside with us and yet we were producing results far more and better. At this moment if you go to poor private schools, the people who are teaching there are secondary school dropouts but all their children are literate. But go to the public sector, the average person cannot read and write because the teachers have refused to teach and they’re being allowed to get away with murder,” he said on PM Express Personality Profile.

He said the main ingredient to improving education is public basic schools is by ensuring strict supervision.

“In teaching in my school, only three things matter; the supervision, that’s the authority of the head teacher supervising them insisting that teachers do teach and holding them accountable, these have been let go at the basic level and therefore, you can see it graphically in our school in my village.

“When they go to senior secondary schools nationwide, this is the year we’re celebrating that 60% passed, but do you know what even that means? And that is a good result, it means 40% failed and the average over the years is 50%. 50% passed and 50% failed. Any education system which produces 50% almost failures is in dire crisis.

Source: adomonline

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