During the last two weeks, I have been spending a lot of time in training courses for science teachers run by the Marshallese ministry of education. The comittment of the Marshallese government towards training their teachers is commendable and - apart from acquiring knowledge about climate change and sea level rise - I also learnt a lot about the educational system as seen from the inside.
Truancy especially is a huge problem in the Marshall Islands. According to the educational minister, Hilda Heine*, net enrollment in primary school is 100%. But attendance rates decline to 68% at lower secondary and only 50% at secondary school. High school completion rates are at 43%.
Talking to the teachers and the facilitators reveals that apart from a gaggle of social factors (such as lack of family support, teen pregnancy, bullying or issues of self-esteem issues) there are two infrastructural reasons for the dwindling rates of attendance:
- the students often lack the funds for transportation. The cheapest taxi fare anywhere in Majuro is $0.5 one way (or $1 if you cross the bridge to Long Island). Since Marshall Islands High School, the largest high school in the country (and one of two on Majuro), used to be a boarding school, students didn't have to rely on cabs. Once the school moved to non-boarding, the school board acquired a school bus that would pick up students on the single road the travels the length of Majuro atoll. This bus broke down a few months ago and there are no spare parts on the islands, nor money in the system to bring in parts from the US.
- Food is also an issue. Some children do not have access to breakfast and consequently they come to school hungry. This is exacerbated by the fact that, since there is no refectory, students have to go back home to eat lunch. Catching a taxi is an expensive (see above) and often time-consuming exercise since the one road that skirts Majuro is often clogged with traffic and it can easily take 20 minutes to go to Long Island. If students come back after lunch at all, they often miss a whole class. When Marshall Islands High school was a boarding school, its refectory fed all students breakfast and lunch. Now they don't have it anymore. Surprisingly, the business opportunity to feed up to 1000 students seems not to have caught on. Only a few ladies sell the standard street food: rice plus chicken meal in styrofoam containers.
All of this makes me quite nostalgic for the olden days .....Indeed I did see a statistics somewhere that standardised testing scores went down. Let me see whether I can dig this out.
* speech given a the World Education Forum 2015 in Icheon, Korea.
Truancy especially is a huge problem in the Marshall Islands. According to the educational minister, Hilda Heine*, net enrollment in primary school is 100%. But attendance rates decline to 68% at lower secondary and only 50% at secondary school. High school completion rates are at 43%.
Talking to the teachers and the facilitators reveals that apart from a gaggle of social factors (such as lack of family support, teen pregnancy, bullying or issues of self-esteem issues) there are two infrastructural reasons for the dwindling rates of attendance:
- the students often lack the funds for transportation. The cheapest taxi fare anywhere in Majuro is $0.5 one way (or $1 if you cross the bridge to Long Island). Since Marshall Islands High School, the largest high school in the country (and one of two on Majuro), used to be a boarding school, students didn't have to rely on cabs. Once the school moved to non-boarding, the school board acquired a school bus that would pick up students on the single road the travels the length of Majuro atoll. This bus broke down a few months ago and there are no spare parts on the islands, nor money in the system to bring in parts from the US.
- Food is also an issue. Some children do not have access to breakfast and consequently they come to school hungry. This is exacerbated by the fact that, since there is no refectory, students have to go back home to eat lunch. Catching a taxi is an expensive (see above) and often time-consuming exercise since the one road that skirts Majuro is often clogged with traffic and it can easily take 20 minutes to go to Long Island. If students come back after lunch at all, they often miss a whole class. When Marshall Islands High school was a boarding school, its refectory fed all students breakfast and lunch. Now they don't have it anymore. Surprisingly, the business opportunity to feed up to 1000 students seems not to have caught on. Only a few ladies sell the standard street food: rice plus chicken meal in styrofoam containers.
All of this makes me quite nostalgic for the olden days .....Indeed I did see a statistics somewhere that standardised testing scores went down. Let me see whether I can dig this out.
* speech given a the World Education Forum 2015 in Icheon, Korea.