Broomes says principals at fault for allowing contentious test in schools

Veteran educator Jeff Broomes has pointed fingers at principals for allowing the controversial Computer Science pretest to be administered at their schools.

But the head of the Barbados Association of Principals of Public Secondary Schools (BAPPS) has defended his members, saying they had no control over the administration of the test that was done at five secondary schools earlier this week.

Broomes, who served as principal at the Alexandra and Parkinson Memorial Secondary Schools, argued that the headmasters were more to blame than Minister of Education Kay McConney.

Speaking on Down to Brasstacks call-in programme on VOB on Friday morning, Broomes said he was disappointed that the principals did not reject the test which inappropriately quizzed first-form students on their sexuality, gender identity, substance use and abuse, as well as personal information about their parents, among other issues.

The pretest was administered by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as part of a Code.org project. The IDB has accepted full responsibility for not removing several questions as requested by the Ministry of Education, and Chief Education Officer Dr Ramona Archer-Bradshaw said the Ministry accepted responsibility for the test reaching the students.

However, Broomes said the principals could not escape blame.

“The Chief Education Officer, her junior officers and the principals are the ones that I think deserve the most criticism. There is no way that I could have been a principal at a school and that survey would have been done at my school. Could never have happened. I would have been called controversial and all kinds of things.

“The principal is responsible for the day-to-day running of the school. Anything like that comes into the school, the principal has to know about it, has to see it. I can’t just abandon my children in classrooms with people I don’t know, because from what I’ve been hearing, no teachers were in the rooms, which is even worse,” Broomes contended.

In an interview with Barbados TODAY following Broome’s comments on radio, BAPPS president Stephen Jackman said the IDB had full autonomy over the administration of the test.

He said while in normal circumstances principals vetted tests given to students, that did not happen in this instance.

“The process that happened this time is how the IDB normally conducts these types of surveys, and usually the school doesn’t have the type of autonomy it would normally have when the IDB is conducting these types of surveys,” Jackman said.

“It is a totally different situation where an international organisation is conducting the survey, in the manner that they normally do. The IDB brings in their own enumerators and delivers the instrument because they don’t want it tainted by anything. The bank normally leads the process because they are collecting information and they don’t want the information tainted by research bias or by anything else.”

He said while he had not yet spoken to any of the principals at the schools where the tests were conducted, discussions would be held once the Ministry of Education concluded its review.

“We really don’t know how all of it happened. I will take Mr Broomes’ suggestion that yes, at the end of the day the buck stops with the principal and the principal should review the questionnaires. We also should have gotten permission slips sent to the parents for the parents to ok the taking of the test. Those are practices that have existed for the longest time.

“I have had no contact with the five schools in which they were administered so I cannot tell you what happened and I am not going to go out of the way to castigate members of my organisation. I know that in general we ask for permission slips and we normally vet the tests,” Jackman said.

randybennett@barbadostoday.bb