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Another school year is ending. One more age-group of Bermuda boys and girls is 'graduating'.

One way or another, each student is ending his or her high school days and moving into a world of work, further academic study, and wide-open opportunity.

Or, entering a world of difficult-to-find work and reduced opportunity.

If, instead of education, these students received years of coddling and cosseting so as to preserve or build up their self-esteem; then the real world of efficient economics, of demanding customers, of rough and tumble managers and bosses; will smash into them like an out-of-control car.

Some 'graduates' will get bruised. Others will get badly hurt. Some will get beaten right down.

That's unfortunate. But that is how the real world operates. Just ask Rick Wagoner — CEO of GM. Ask the ex-staff at Trimingham's and Smith's. Look up somebody who used to build or sell Rover Cars.

On graduation, all of Bermuda's high school graduates — public and private — go into a winner-take-all open competition with each other. Immediately after graduation, the graduate of Berkeley or Cedarbridge has no structural advantage over, or protection from, his or her counterpart at Saltus or Warwick Academy.

Sure, it's easy to skew some scholarship awards so that there appears to be a better 'balance' between recipients from the public and private education systems. But that does not affect the colleges that accept those graduates.

The reality test

Colleges still rely on SAT results or other external validations like the GCSE and IB programmes.

Skewing scholarship awards temporarily camouflages, but doesn't eliminate the differences.

In the first reality test, students get accepted at colleges ranging from those known to be 'top' universities and those recognized as bottom tier colleges.

The business community that hires or takes on college graduates provides the second reality test. These entities seek to hire real skill, brainpower, and potential. They make a basic assumption. They assume that if a person was good enough to get into and then graduate from a 'top' or 'good' college, then that person will likely have better potential than someone who could only get into a bottom tier college.

After high school and college, what is really all that matters is potential and raw ability. Graduating with a good degree from a 'good' college demonstrates that a person has brainpower and raw ability. Graduating with a degree from an unremarkable or low grade college doesn't — to the same extent.

So, twelve months further along. Another age-group about to walk across the stage and enter the real world. Have we done well for them? Have we given them the ability to get into 'good' colleges and universities? Did we give them enough basic knowledge and skills so they can benefit from good trade or vocational training? Did we do all of that? Or did we just manage to graduate half — yet again? As long as we go on graduating abysmally low numbers — percentages — we are guilty of under-preparing our own Bermudian people. As long as public sector education rumbles and grumbles and stumbles along spending more money than the smoothly functioning private sector education and then gets a lower percentage result, public education is failing.

No excuse, no reasons, no explanations can undo the damage that has been done to an 18-year-old Bermudian who, after thirteen years of public education, walks across the stage and enters the real world as an ill-prepared or under-educated adult. That walk across that stage takes him and her out of the world of excuses and reasons and explanations.

It drops her and him into a world of direct competition — right here on the streets of Bermuda.

That competition is against the graduates of the alphabet of competitive public education systems in Austria, Barbados, Canada, Dominica, Ecuador, France, India, U.K., U.S., and all the other countries who send their workers, educated in their public systems, to work in Bermuda.

We owe our young Bermudians more than we've given them in the past. Did we do better this year than last? Have we, in this year, raised the graduation rate from dismal to at least hopeful?

If we're honest — and we owe that to ourselves and to our Bermudian students — we'll publish and compare results. If the public education system is worth anything at all, this year's results will — on fair comparison — be materially better than last year's.

If results are not better, we ought to admit failure, stop making excuses, stop offering reasons, and stop explaining. We need action and improvement![[In-content Ad]]

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