Former Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Education (MoE), Prof Jacob Kaimenyi made two landmark decisions with potentially immense consequences to education in this country.
Lest we forget: Kaimenyi was the first Cabinet Secretary for Education under the former President Uhuru Kenyatta.
He restricted secondary school fees to the current 53,000 for National Schools and lowered fees ceilings for other categories of secondary schools. Kaimenyi also discontinued the ranking of students on the basis of national examinations results as had been the practice since 1994.
Before the discontinuation of rankings, the MoE used to provide upon release of KCPE and KCSE examination results, detailed information about the top 100 candidates nationally. The Ministry released the information to media houses for dissemination.
However, the leadership at MoE, led by Kaimenyi and the Principal Secretary for Basic Education, Dr Belio Kipsang, stopped the practice in 2014.
The pair was not the first to raise questions about the educational value of ranking of students.
Former Vice Chancellor for Kenyatta University, Prof George Eshiwani who questioned the ranking in 1994. He did in his capacity as the Chair of the Kenya National Examinations Council.
He told the Kenya Heads of Secondary Schools Association Conference, Rift Valley Branch at Moi Girls High School, Eldoret, that the ranking of schools in KCPE and KCSE was misplaced because it was students and not schools which sat for the examinations.
Nationally
Eshiwani said that instead of ranking schools in the national examinations, KNEC should rank students nationally.
I covered the function under the auspices of the Kenya News Agency (KNA). I was based at the then Uasin Gishu District.
The government didn’t end the ranking. It restricted it to students and not the school. This was, however, the first sign that there was something fundamentally wrong with ranking in national examinations.
It was the Report on Student Discipline and Unrest in Schools, which was chaired by Naomy Wangai, then the Director of Education, that recommended that the government stop ranking schools and students in national examinations.
The report argues that the ranking had created practices that had detrimental effects to good teaching and learning practices; it was causing unnecessary pressure on schools and students to excel in examinations.
That was in 2001. It was Kaimenyi, some 15 years later, who put a stop to ranking of students and, by default, schools altogether.
Eshiwani ban on ranking of schools had not worked either. The ranking of schools meant identifying the schools the students had had their primary and secondary education.
So, the pressure to have their students ranked meant that schools did everything within their power to ensure their students get top grade marks.
Prime students
With ranking of any sort, the temptation to focus on passing examinations of students is higher. The necessary balance between teaching, learning and testing is tilted. You see more testing and less teaching and learning in most schools to prime students on how best to tackle examinations and not, strictly speaking, to learn.
The 2001 Report by Wangai addressed this problem exhaustively. The holistic education that the Government envisions is children not to have suffers when there is imbalance between teaching, learning and testing.
In banning ranking in examinations, Kaimenyi sought to reclaim education at the school level, back to its compass: Development of the intelligence and character of learners to its utmost limits possible.
The government has stuck to the spirit of the Wangai Report as affirmed by the discontinuation of ranking, be it of students or schools, when national examinations results are released.
Regrettably, however, media houses have stained this policy by hunting out students who excelled in any given examination and publishing them. The media doesn’t just publish their names; they also publish the schools they had their education in. This negates government policy on banning ranking altogether.
Clearly, the fanfare denies the country the opportunity to look at many issues—away from ranking of individual students and schools—about the state of education.
A national examination is much more than grading, certification and placement of students. The examination gauges students’ learning capacities, recognises educational gaps, and prompts appropriate remedial actions.
We lose sight of these other equally critical functions of examinations when the mass media prods the nation to focus on “stellar” performance of a fewer number of the entire population of students.
Bigger purposes
Unquestionably, the discontinuation of officially sanctioned ranking was urging us to look at the bigger purposes of a national education system such as ours.
Are we properly educating the next generation? Are we attaining the stipulated benchmarks for learning? Are the controls to this effect effective? What else can we do to enhance children’s access, equity and quality in education? What are the examination results, looked at from a social justice perspective, telling us?
Remember, it was Kaimenyi who curtailed the irrational levels of school fees in secondary schools and ranking in examinations in 2014.
Properly interpreted, this is what the former Cabinet Secretary Kaimenyi sought to tell Kenyans to: we shouldn’t curtail in whichever manner, access to equitable quality education across the breadth and length of this country through strategies of doubtful value such as ranking in national examinations.
By Kennedy Buhere
Buhere is a Communication Specialist
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