Teachers can better manage Ghana’s Education without GES and Unions 

Teachers can better manage Ghana’s Education without GES and Unions. If you are not ready to be provoked, do not continue reading.

Nearly every problem hunting pre-tertiary education in Ghana can be attributed to the choices and decisions of the leadership of the education sector.

As you read this, I challenge you to read with an open mind however, if you do not get the import of this argument, take your time and read it all over again.

Focusing on pre-tertiary education, the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the infamous teacher unions have done more harm than good to education in the last five years.

Sadly the mother governing body, the Ministry of Education has compounded the problems making education unattractive, frustrating, and demotivating for teachers in the classrooms.

Teachers can better manage Ghana’s Education – Do you Agree?

Teachers can better manage Ghana’s Education because in all this mess, they generally assist in learners by shaping their knowledge toward academic success and career by sharing their knowledge as well as the wisdom required to conquer not just the education huddles but work, and career.

What are the benefits of leadership and management in education? The importance of leadership and management offers a foundation for developing and involving students in educational activities. Regardless of whether or not a teacher takes on a formal leadership role, these qualities can help improve classroom performance.

Quantitative education development objectives (for example, achieving universal access to education) may be more successfully and efficiently fulfilled if human resources, particularly teachers, are carefully planned, allocated, utilized, and managed. I wonder if we are achieving this especially when nearly 35,000 teachers exited the profession in Ghana in 2020/2021.

READ: Download Lesson Plans Online | How to Find or Search Lesson Plans

Some challenges that give teachers headaches

We are in the first term of 2022 yet, the GES, Teacher Unions, and the Education Ministry are quiet over the problem of no textbooks for basic school learners.

It has been three years since the new curriculum was pushed into the education sector without the requisite resources for teachers and learners.

Imagine a teacher fails to write his or her lesson plans for a term, s/he will be seen as unproductive, unprofessional, and judged by the Judases and Pontius Pilates of education management as guilty. That teacher will be handed a letter indicating s/he has been interdicted. Teacher Kwadwo comes to mind for a wrong he had denied.

It has been over 3 years and no one has been shown the exit at the GES, MoE, or NaCCA for their respective roles in ensuring our children go to school without textbooks. The Teacher Unions who are supposed to serve as a mouthpiece and a team of unions that speak truth to power do not look like what we expect them to be.

What kind of country are we in the 21^st century? Sometimes the very backward education-related decisions which are less responsive to the needs of the time and poorly thought of strategies that do not yield the desired results are implanted in a rush. The Trimester timetable readily comes to mind.

It took the cries and voices of hundreds of thousands of teachers to get managers of education to come out of their shells to give updates on issues of great concern sometime.

This can be interpreted to mean teachers have foresight, look into the future and examine the implications of education policies and plans compared to the managers of education who should know better.

Teachers are better managers of our Education right from their various well-built and poor structures and classrooms in the cities, schools under-trees in deprived communities, places in Ghana where children learn in death traps called classrooms, and where learners struggle for space on the ground to write in the sand for the teacher to access to those who are lucky to have structure but sit on their bellies to write and learn.

The list said about places where there are newly constructed classrooms but due to political myopia school children and teachers are forced to use weak and dangerous structures while the better classrooms are left to rot under the vagaries of the weather.

In each of the described classrooms and schools above, you will find a teacher whose salary is demotivating and works under poor conditions of service compared to what is paid the non-performing officers at the GES, MoE, and other public education institution charged to ensure quality education management and deliverables at all levels.

Of our teachers are still breaking their backs, overcoming barriers, and performing mind-blowing magic of different degrees to impart knowledge.

Struggling to find materials to help teach pupils that government has refused to see as its priority continuous unabated.

Does the government set targets for the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education? If the answer is no, do they set targets for themselves? Are they able to measure their own performance and genuinely tell how well they have performed?

The answer is no, yet every teacher has to set his or her own daily and lesson-specific targets and work at them every day. Our teachers are indeed better managers of our education but why are those managing our education at the strategic level still at the post when they are not pulling their weight as required of them?

Teacher Kwadwo was fired by the very people who have failed to give the people of Ghana the needed transformational education leadership.

While it is worth the investment to build schools, there is more common sense in completing those started by successive governments when the resources being used are owned by the people of Ghana.

Parents and guardians are not helping teachers in this era when Education has advanced with many countries using IT in the classroom, we cannot boast of textbooks for learners yet, parents are quiet because they will not incur additional costs to buy the textbooks.

Our education system is sick, our teachers are being overused and the future of our public school children is in jeopardy.

The politicians do not care a hoot about your children. Many of them have children who are your ward’s age and classmates but their children are in better international schools, these children do not know poverty, stress, and what it means to learn in a school for three years without textbooks and without an IT lab.

I salute the teachers in the hinterlands and don’t blame those who are posted to very disheartening schools.

In all these, the Ghanaian teacher stands tall. Teachers continue to exhibit high levels of professionalism, call to duty, service beyond self, are architects of many great future dreams as they continue to map out and guide the lives of learners toward their academic goals.

Burning themselves, they light up the young and uniformed minds each year. Teachers are the Master Kente weavers of our education as they continue to knit together knowledge, skills, and talents of diverse kinds across subject areas and classes year after year to create the next useful human resource needed for national growth and development.

What at all have those at the top done that we can praise them for? They have in this term for instance shown that they are not on top of their jobs by committing an abnormal blunder of shooting a semester calendar in the face of teachers, asking young minds right from the KG to JHS to use the semester system without consulting stakeholders.

It took the cries of teachers for the teacher unions to start a face-saving crusade of calling on the managers of education to reverse the decision.

The managers of education in Ghana are not living up to expectations yet they are not confident enough to accept their flawed decisions. Accepting you erred is not a sign of weakness but the reverse.

The Minister’s comment that he reversed the semester calendar to a trimester to make teachers happy is not only annoying but very disrespectful given the valid logical reasons why teachers called for the reversal.

Ghana’s pre-tertiary education teachers have some amazing and novel ideas that can be harnessed by those in leadership to improve education and its associated outcomes however, who will listen to them and who will lend support to the ideas?

The managers of Ghana’s Education must begin to harness tacit knowledge from teachers including their suggestions on issues of great concern.

In developing strategies that work, forward-looking institutions believe that strategy is an idea and can emanate from every level and facet of the institution.

If our leaders of education cannot share their vision with teachers and make them see the positive side of it, they have failed to carry every teacher and stakeholder along to understand and appreciate their vision. We cannot improve the education sector outcomes with this approach.

In the same vane if leadership continues to see education strategies are a preserve of leadership we shall suffer the impact of not tapping into the ideas of the great minds in our classrooms.

Indeed our teachers are better managers of our education. Teachers can better manage Ghana’s education without GES and the teacher unions. But of what use will it be if the GES, MoE, and teachers and teacher unions do not fight common enemies of our education.

We have to save our education system while introducing changes. We must also do implement the modifications without political craftsmanship and marketing or else we shall make the same mistakes of the past.

READ: 2021 BECE Results and School Placement Related Questions & Answers

What is your take on this? Teachers can better manage Ghana’s Education without GES and Unions   Teachers are managers, so let’s give them the tools to manage.

Source: Wisdom Hammond