The Campaign Against Privatization and Commercialization of Education (CAPCOE) believes the plans by government to privatize education will not in any way, improve on the standards of education in the country.
According to CAPCOE, the introduction of the ‘Free Senior High School’ policy is creating an undue pressure on the country’s merger resources, the purpose for which government wants to sublet some public basic schools to the private entities to manage.
Government’s inability to manage the public schools due to scarce resources to provide teaching and learning materials, according to CAPCOE could be a contributory factor to the falling standards of education in the country, especially at the basic school level.
Richard Kwashie Kovey, a representative of National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) at CAPCOE who revealed this added that government quest to hand over the management of basic schools to the private sector is a non-starter and it risk creating inequality in the delivery of education.
“CAPCOE for sometime has been monitoring the kind of attention given to the education sector. You will notice that there is largely a neglect when it comes to funding of the public education. What we’ve noticed is that, the cost of running free education is becoming a more of a burden to government and donor partners, there is an attempt to divert attention. So, now they are capitalizing on the idea that the public schools are not performing so lets now focus on the private sector. And that is a very bad move for our country”
Mr. Kwashie revealed this in a discussion on A1 Radio on the privatization of education in the country. He added that, once basic education is a right, government should prioritize it and provide the needed teaching and learning materials with funding instead of “selling it to the private hands”.
The Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) representative at CAPCOE, Festus Longmartey who kicked against government’s plans to commercialized education called on government to invest more on the public education sector.
“If we are outsourcing the management of basic schools to the private sector because we think that the private person is better, what will happen is that because the private person is profit oriented, when they are to admit students, they will be discriminatory. If a child that has a learning difficulty, that child might make it difficult for them of having a % 100 pass. So, they will end up not admitting that child”.
He further stated that they are not entirely against private participation of the education sector but what CAPCOE is not in tangent with government privatization idea is a possible situation where parents will have just one option of educating their wards through private schools.
Source: A1Radioonline.com|Joshua Asaah|101.1Mhz
