#BTColumn – Challenging CXC and COVID-19 protocols

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Marsha Hinds

This week the Cs have it! I wish to weigh in on the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) saga and our COVID-19 protocols. Our nationalist institutions seem to be in crisis. I wrote about the teetering union a few weeks ago, and this week, I spend some time reflecting on the Caribbean Examination Council.

The Caribbean Examination Council was founded in 1972. It rose from the proverbial ashes of the crash of the Federation ten years before. Friends and political colleagues, Errol Barrow of Barbados, Vere Bird of Antigua and Forbes Burnham of Guyana had committed to a Free Trade Area in 1965.

The Council to further expand access to education and indigenize the syllabus was the next significant agreement of what eventually became known as CARICOM.

CXC has grown from strength to strength over the years, or so I thought. I notice that after the saga broke there were comments that suggested that all had not been well in at least the last three to five years.

I certainly remember the teachers highlighting the exploitation of them to mark scripts without being paid to do that work. CXC seemed to effectively keep the issue looking like the teacher’s fault, and I am not sure what the substantive outcome was.

As is the case with many issues, few people were interested in the principles the teachers were putting on the table. It did not affect them or their children at the time, and the teachers were left to battle it.

In hindsight, perhaps the teachers’ concerns could have been a suitable entrée for us to reflect on where CXC had come over the years and whether we were comfortable with the regional examination body.

As is our habit, we waited for an all out crisis instead. I would go as far as to say a crisis that affects the prestigious schools in the region, because I am clear that this issue would not be getting the attention it has if the grading off had been on the lower end of the spectrum.

This is not the first time that students have been disadvantaged by CXC’s decisions. Let us quickly look at CXC’s policy for students affected by what is traditionally described as dyslexia.

CXC’s position is that such a child, once they produce a psychological report, will be given the resources recommended in the psychological report.

This can include scribes, readers, etc. However, those supports are not offered in the English A examination. The reason given is that English is supposed to be the child’s language of functioning. This rule confounds me.

Learning deficits on the spectrum formerly called dyslexia affect language skills the most. The support given to children is to mitigate the effect of the deficit. How will a child ever pass English A without the support? There are no parents in a line on this issue because unfortunately, the demographic of parents it affects most do not have time from work and money to hire queen’s counsel.

The way that CXC has dismissed the concerns about the 2020 results is becoming a modus operandi. Instead of offering an open door policy for dialogue and solution finding they seem to have stepped behind bureaucracy. That is very unfortunate given the fact that CXC was, in part, established to squash British bureaucracy and enable Caribbean students.

We have spent the last few months watching as Donald Trump has done his best to be on the opposite side of the proclamations that medical doctors make about COVID-19.  I wonder if we had our own ‘trump card’ played recently when the concerns of the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners about our latest COVID protocol were seemingly silenced.

Everybody knows that Barbados’ biggest economic driver is tourism. We also know how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed all our lives and ways of doing business. The question we have to answer in a small, vulnerable, open economy is which will be the premium – continuing to make money off tourism or overseeing the public health?

Five weekly flights from Miami to Barbados have resumed. Florida remains on the list of American states where contagion rates are soaring.

So we are increasing traffic from a high risk area while, at the same time, moving away from 14 days of quarantine. That seems to go against medical direction both at the local level and internationally.

Avoiding non-essential travel is another general remedy to avoiding the spread of COVID-19. We understand, given the organization of our economy, why we have to break this rule. I don’t think we can break many more past that rule. If we open up the tourism sector and end up with a country blacklisted for travel, we are no further forward. The international world is neither willing to break best practice with us or overlook us when we do.

Marsha Hinds is the President of the National Organisation of Women.