The country's education system is grappling with a lack of Bahamian instructors qualified to teach in "critical" subjects like Math, English and sciences, former Minister of Education Desmond Bannister said yesterday.
Bannister added that the government school system is entrenched in bureaucracy making it difficult for officials to remove a few unqualified instructors from the system.
The senator's comments came a day after the Ministry of Education released the results of the 2012 Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) and Bahamas Junior Certificate (BJC) exams.
According to a report prepared by the Ministry of Education on the BGCSE results, students sitting the exams received an average letter grade of D in English Language and E+ in Mathematics. The two subjects were among 19 that saw an improvement in results from last year.
Bannister said in spite of the average scores for Math and English, BGCSE results have improved year-over-year for the past three years. Still, he conceded that the results show that students are struggling with core areas like numeracy and literacy.
He said while there is a shortage of Bahamian teachers qualified to teach subjects like Math, English and the sciences, there is a disproportionate number of teachers specializing in general or religious studies.
"We have many outstanding teachers, but we also have to get more teachers into disciplines that are important," he said in an interview with The Nassau Guardian.
He recalled that in 2010 out of the graduates from The College of The Bahamas' teaching program only two specialized in English, seven in math and five in Biology.
He said there were none in Chemistry, none in Physics and 40 in primary school education.
"I looked at the trend for five years; you had more in primary education and more in religious education," Bannister said. "In all these critical areas where you really needed teachers to develop students you weren't getting them."
He said the numbers prompted the ministry to change its policy on grants for students entering teaching programs so that there was more incentive for aspiring teachers to specialize in areas like Math and English.
He added that during his time in office the ministry was also forced to hire a number of foreign teachers to fill the gaps.
Bannister said the public school system needs to adapt to changes in the educational field, but added that it is difficult for ministry officials to remove unsatisfactory teachers from the practice.
"But you can't fire teachers in The Bahamas," he said. "For example, I've gone into classrooms, I've visited every school in the country except for two, where I've seen -- and this is on very few occasions -- but I've seen some incompetent teachers.
"You can't fire them because you have unions and you have agreements and there are ways that things have to be done.
"You have any number of other issues that have to be dealt with but you have a bureaucracy called the Ministry of Education and a Department of Education..."
On Tuesday, Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald said that nearly 50 percent of high school seniors do not meet requirements to graduate with diplomas. Instead, they are given leaving certificates that only show they attended the school.
When asked what could be a reason for this, Bannister said that for decades the officials in the public school system have not been able to address the problems it faces.
"Over the last 40 years or so we basically had a lot of mediocrity in education in The Bahamas and we've paid a lot of lip service to education rather than trying to look at the real problems that impact our schools, and so we've become a lot like big cities in the United States where you have 40 or 50 percent of our children in our big inner city schools graduating and 50 percent not graduating," he said.
"You'll find that's different in the Family Islands, it's different in the smaller schools but when you look at the inner city schools that is the problem and you'll find that examination results are very poor."
Bannister said other problems government schools face include having to educate students with behavioral problems who may have been expelled from private institutions; students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and thousands of students who have undiagnosed learning disabilities.

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