Orlando Patterson (Harvard University)

The Jamaican Education System in Comparative Terms: A Prelude to Reform

In this working paper I examine Jamaica’s education system in comparative terms. There are important advantages to such comparisons. They indicate how a country is performing in relation to the rest of the world, and especially to countries at Jamaica's  level of development. The value of such knowledge is not just to show how well a nation is doing in the development horse race, but to highlight where it is lagging, or doing well, and to point toward best practices that are appropriate for policy making.  Comparisons can also show what issues are peculiar to a particular country, rather than simply local versions of a general problem that has been effectively addressed elsewhere. At a deeper level, as the educational economists Hanushek and Woessmann noted  in their classic work on the subject, such comparisons offer variations that do not exist within single countries, allowing scholars to explore the relative effectiveness of complex processes such as accountability systems, the role of teacher unions and of labor markets. We will not be getting into such issues in this paper. Instead, I pursue the more modest goal, mentioned above, of examining how the Jamaican education system is performing on key indicators in relation to other nations, in the hope of gaining insights into where we need to focus our attempts at reform

Orlando Patterson is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.

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