Accountability Without Moral, Legal, or Institutional Preconditions: Responsibility shifting disguised as reform

Dear Editor:

The Education Minister’s recent announcement that the Ministry of Education intends to introduce “school report cards” as a mechanism to enhance accountability and improve performance across Guyana’s education system demands careful and sober examination. Accountability, if it is to retain any real meaning, cannot be reduced to a rhetorical device or a performance metric imposed selectively. In credible systems of governance, accountability is a moral, legal, and institutional discipline that must be grounded in legitimacy, consistency, capacity, and example.

Measured against these standards, the Ministry’s current posture on accountability is fundamentally flawed. Before schools are graded, the Ministry itself must demonstrate that it has satisfied the basic preconditions that make accountability lawful, fair, and effective.

Accountability Requires Legal Standing:
At its most basic level, accountability presupposes respect for the rule of law. As matters stand, the Ministry remains associated with unresolved controversy surrounding compliance with court rulings relating to the reinstatement of union dues. A public authority that struggles to demonstrate consistent obedience to judicial authority lacks the moral and institutional standing to posture as an enforcer of accountability over others.

International best practice is clear on this point. Accountability cannot flow downward while legal obligations at the apex of the system are treated as negotiable. Such asymmetry does not strengthen institutions; it corrodes them and undermines public trust.

Abandoned Policy Cannot Be Recast as Reform:
The Minister’s proposal to reintroduce teacher appraisals is framed as progress, yet it rests on a deeply problematic history. The previous appraisal exercise was initiated, abruptly suspended, never completed, never evaluated, and never accounted for. No final framework was published, no institutional lessons were documented, and no responsibility was assumed for its abandonment.

In serious governance systems, reform is cumulative and evidence-based. Recycling an unfinished and unexamined policy does not constitute reform; it reflects administrative amnesia and a failure of institutional discipline.

Investment Claimed, Outcomes Unverified:
The primary justification advanced for school report cards is the claim that the government has made significant investments in education through new schools, resources, textbooks, and trained teachers, leading to the assertion that “there should be no excuse why someone can’t develop.” This line of reasoning conflates expenditure with effectiveness and announcements with outcomes.

Across Guyana, newly constructed or rehabilitated schools have developed leaking roofs, cracking walls, and structural defects within months of handover. These are not failures of teaching or school leadership. They are failures of procurement oversight, contractor accountability, quality assurance, and enforcement of defects-liability obligations. In international practice, investment is measured by durable outcomes, not by contract values or press releases. Expenditure that deteriorates before it delivers educational value is not investment; it is public spending without accountability. Yet under the proposed report card regime, schools and teachers will be evaluated, while the Ministry officials who approved, supervised, certified, and paid for defective works remain beyond scrutiny.

Standards Breached, Comparisons Enforced:
Official policy recognizes student-to-teacher ratios of approximately 15:1 at nursery and early primary levels, 20:1 to 25:1 across Grades 1 through 6, and around 30:1 at the secondary level. In practice, these standards are routinely breached. In some primary schools, class sizes exceed those found in secondary institutions, while in several secondary schools, teachers are responsible for student numbers far beyond policy limits.

International accountability frameworks do not penalize institutions for outcomes produced under conditions that violate prescribed inputs. To rank and judge schools while ignoring breaches of staffing architecture is not accountability; it is the evaluation of results divorced from the conditions that make success possible.

Equity Ignored, Uniform Judgement Imposed:
Schools across Guyana do not operate on a level playing field. Resources, staffing levels, infrastructure quality, security arrangements, and learner support vary significantly by region and community. Despite this reality, the proposed report cards assume comparability and uniformity.

Uniform accountability imposed on unequal conditions is not fairness. It is structural injustice repackaged as measurement and risks entrenching disadvantage rather than promoting improvement.

Safety, Nutrition, and Learning Capacity Marginalised:
Many schools remain inadequately secured, and teachers have been robbed on school compounds. A Ministry that cannot guarantee basic safety cannot credibly escalate performance scrutiny. Professional accountability cannot flourish in environments where personal security is uncertain.

At the same time, teachers are expected to deliver improved learning outcomes while students attend school hungry or inadequately fed. Teachers do not award feeding contracts, design menus, or manage procurement, yet they are expected to compensate for the cognitive and developmental consequences of hunger. Any accountability framework that ignores these realities is fundamentally incomplete.

Learning Needs Acknowledged Rhetorically, Unsupported in Practice:
Teachers are increasingly required to educate students with learning disabilities, trauma-related challenges, and foundational literacy and numeracy gaps without adequate diagnostic services, specialist support, classroom aids, or reduced class sizes. Responsibility is imposed without the capacity necessary to discharge it effectively.

Accountability without capacity is not reform. It is abdication, with responsibility displaced onto those least equipped to absorb it.

Professional Dignity Indefinitely Deferred:
For years, teachers have endured stalled promotions and administrative paralysis. Some retired without advancement, some died waiting, and others resigned out of frustration and financial strain. Teachers in Guyana are increasingly part of the working and struggling poor, despite the national importance of their work.

International best practice recognizes that professional accountability is inseparable from professional dignity. Systems that demand excellence while denying progression, security, and respect reduce accountability to coercion.

Conclusion: Accountability Must Be Earned Before It Is Enforced:
Taken together, these contradictions reveal a central truth. What is being proposed is not accountability in any serious or credible sense. It is pressure without principle, measurement without fairness, and authority without example. It is bullying masquerading as reform.

If the Ministry is serious about accountability, it must begin with itself through lawful conduct, complete policies, enforced standards, secure schools, adequate nutrition, transparent procurement, equitable resourcing, and respect for the teaching profession. Until these preconditions are met, school report cards will reveal little about educational quality and much about a government prepared to grade teachers for failures it refuses to own.

Yours truly,
Hon. Coretta McDonald.
Member of Parliament
APNU