Match the Effort

The latest Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA) are hard numbers telling us that if we do not change course now, we are preparing children for a future they cannot navigate.

To her credit, Minister of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport Melissa Gumbs framed the results she announced on Tuesday (no details yet) as a warning for our future workforce, public services and social resilience, and she is right to do so. More important, she is placing these assessments on a broader track that includes a review of Foundation Based Education, a move to link school board subsidies to improvements in student outcomes, and now a public focus on early literacy and numeracy.

The EGRA and EGMA are early risk assessments for our economy, our health system and our democracy. They give a rough baseline of effort versus result, and such baselines are uncomfortable. They expose the gap between what we like to say about our education system and what actually happens in classrooms. That discomfort is exactly the point. If we are honest, this is the conversation many prefer to avoid, because it forces us to admit that when a six year old cannot read simple words, the failure should be shared.

When Minister Gumbs calls on school boards, the Division of Public Education, teachers, student care coordinators, school managers and parents to work together, she is really saying something larger: if a child fails, we all failed them at some point. That is not comfortable language for politicians or for the public, but it is truthful.

There are also angles to this that are easy to miss if we diminish her message, as we tend to do with uncomfortable discussions. One such angle is automation. The jobs that tolerate weak reading and math skills are the same jobs that are disappearing fastest worldwide. If St. Maarten allows a generation to pass through primary school unable to read and reason at a solid level, we are effectively training them for a labor market that will not exist.

The risk now is that we treat the Minister’s call as “her problem” to solve. That would repeat one of our most persistent habits: expecting the Ministry to fix in the very short term what families, institutions and the community have allowed to erode over decades. If St. Maarten is serious about changing these results, then we need a cultural shift as well as a policy shift.

Math will probably never be everyone’s best friend. Many will always feel more at home with words than with numbers. That is human. What we cannot afford is a society where either of those basic tools is treated as optional. Reading and math are not school subjects to “get through”; they are the language of work, of contracts, of public health, of democracy.

Minister Gumbs has chosen to look our reality in the eye and to put uncomfortable data on the table. She is reviewing the system we built, adjusting the way we fund it and asking every stakeholder to step up. We should recognize that as an attempt to change the trajectory of a generation.

If we are wise, we will match that effort with our own.

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