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Twenty years of public education failure and mismatch resulted in students who 'dropped out' or who graduated but were materially under-educated - and who then got older.

These became buried landmines. These landmines are planted throughout Bermuda's 13,000 acres and seeded amongst our 50,000 Bermudian

people.

Throughout the 20 years of the generational change decade of 1980 to 1990, and the business model shift decade of 1990 to 2000, the public system held on to the low quality and under-delivering BSSC. This resulted in most of its student output being under-educated. Under-educated that is, relative to the new and higher demands of Bermuda's shifting national business model.

Between 1990 and 2000, Bermuda shifted from tourism to international business.  This was a shift from skill-base - what you could do, to knowledge-base - what you knew or could think through.

During the 1990s the number of drop-outs and non-graduates from the public system began rising noticeably. Even though the minister as well as the administrators in the Ministry of Education refused to give out consistent official figures, by 2005, drop-out and non-graduation rates were exceeding 60 per cent.

Like landmines, these dropouts and non-graduates sank beneath the surface of Bermuda's rapidly growing but also rapidly changing society and economy. From 1994, Bermuda's changing economy began sucking in global labour. It sucked it in so fast, that by 2005 - in the private sector - there was one guest worker for every two Bermudian workers.  

Those 16-year old dropouts or non-graduates of 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 have grown older. Some have become part of Bermuda's 35, 30, 25, and 20 year-old angry underclass of 2009. They are angry because all around them, they see growth, wealth, and success that seem beyond their reach.

For them, it is genuinely beyond their reach because unlike better-educated persons, they are ill equipped to reach out and get a handhold on Bermuda's new national business model.

They get frustrated. Their frustrations become the explosive concealed behind their ordinary Bermudian faces. These sometimes smiling Bermudian faces do not reveal the explosive within. But we hear them exploding all around us. We see - and we ritually bury - the casualties.

An unbroken succession of years of education failure helped create this problem. Years of patience coupled with a realistic but strategic national response will be necessary to deal with the trail of trouble that sucks along in the vortex of this issue.

The Booby Trap

From 1970 to 1990, the number of people employed in the public education system oscillated around 622. After 1990, even though student numbers were falling, the number of public system teachers, administrators, and other staff began growing. By 2007, that teacher group had mushroomed to 1,203. Worse still, these staffing levels were increasing even as the student count AND standard of output from the public system were dropping. 

In 2007, the Hopkins Report publicly damned Bermuda's public educating system as a failed system.

Consistently successful education systems - not just here in Bermuda but in the Caribbean, Canada, Finland - operate with a staff to student ratio between one to 10 and one to 15. Currently, Bermuda's public system has a staff to student ratio of one to 5.  Bermuda's public education system should be efficient and effective at one to 10.  

Globally, in every public or private corporate entity, over-staffing always leads to inefficiency and poor results. From church to carmaker, no entity escapes this reality. If Bermuda's public education system is significantly over-staffed, then this over-staffing will prove a barrier to progress, and an even greater impediment to change.

With this proposed Cambridge programme Bermuda's public education system must deliver a higher quality output. To do so, it will have to follow best corporate practice. That means only employing best employees and only those employees whose performance directly supports the desired output.

It is highly unlikely that all current 1,200+ persons - the employee component of the publicly acknowledged failed system - are best employees. It is also highly unlikely that all 1,200-plus directly support useful output.

With fewer than 6,000 students, no more than 750 teachers and 'staff' and 'administrators' SHOULD be needed in a public education system that operates, at the least, as effectively as Bermuda's private sector - or good public systems in other countries. So around 400 to 500 of the persons currently employed by the whole of the public educating system are likely to be surplus.

Those five hundred can vote.  Each has friends and family who can vote. This is the booby trap!

Will today's bundle of troubled Premier, weakened Cabinet, seventeenth minister, and revolving-door cycle of Education Board chairmen - three chairmen (and three ministers) in the past twelve months - take the action required to make public education work again?

With a flip-flop-flip minister who vacated his Cabinet seat, then retreated and re-assumed the same seat; who stepped up standards for Middle-schoolers entering CedarBridge and Berkeley - and then dropped those same standards down again; who promised openness but who still has not published this year's graduation results; will this seventeenth minister be able to hold to any plan or keep any promise?

Will this distracted and unfocused PLP government and now more divided community deal with the booby trap? Or will this distracted government and more divided community continue to blind itself to the booby trap; deny any need to deal with it; leave it in place - and, as a consequence, remain mired in the mess of yet one more unworkable solution in this 20-year long cavalcade of past unworkable solutions?

If we do not deal with the booby trap, we cannot change.  If we do not change, we - all of us Bermudians - will eventually but fairly quickly lose what we now have. We will lose because we will go on making, burying, and then stupidly stepping on old as well as newly made and freshly buried landmines.

Whatever we do, an answer will come. Either the answer dictated by national commonsense. Or the answer that will result from the continued uncontrolled explosions of those landmines.  One or the other!

For national success in public education, Bermuda must accept and bear the pain of real change. That change - real change - must start now - this day. We must deal with the booby trap so that we can get through that door and first reach, then stop, and then turnaround the current landmine-creating process.[[In-content Ad]]

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