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How many teachers handled the 2023 KCSE candidates? At what cost in terms of government subsidy, teaching and learning materials, teacher salaries, non-teaching staff salaries, utilities and other attendant costs?

Do these results meet the national assessment expectations? If not what strategies have been developed to mitigate the loss of learning and deviation from the national standards. Having asked and answered these questions; what value do we get from the just released results? Is it value for tax-payers’ money?

These questions may not be answered by the policy makers and bureaucrats because they have taken the nation to the cliff and forced it into the consumerist framing of issues that protects and promotes the idea that a ‘public good can be advertised and be managed like a private business’.

This is made possible since the political class own the media and there is a deliberate ‘bifurcation’ to limit public participation and perceptions especially on the influential actors in learning outcomes to teachers, parents, and students to obscure systemic and policy factors that are supposed to shape skill development and knowledge acquisition in an education system.

The leadership in the education sector has adopted the crisis approach centering on cheating and related malpractices during the release of national results to obscure any other critical issue occupying any reasonable portion of public discourse.  In this way, the public voice to protect the public good is lost in the firefighting to appear like we are resolving the problems.

The ‘fallacy’ of framing inexactitudes by lay experts and interlocutors in the education sector in the pretext of preparing learners for the workplace is what occupies our national discourse and energies for most of the time without lifting our national eyes from the dining table to the horizon where the national problem lies. The ‘propaganda’ is moved from education being a public good to that which delivers individual income or gain. We focus on comparing outcomes rather than shaping how we have nurtured skills acquisition and development of learners. We have failed as a nation to connect how learning happens against the structures that facilitate the learning process.

The structural and systematic issues are left out; they include capitation considerations, accountability within the system, description of totality of the learning process and contexts within which it happens and attendant guidelines that fail the process.

The just released exam results showed that 54.72 per cent of candidates scored D plus and below. Three thousand candidates failed to show up in for the examination. That is all that was mentioned and without telling the nation who is supposed to be held to account and what tracing mechanism has been put in place to ensure they are not lost in the labyrinth of issues in the education sector- especially for those that failed to sit the exams for one reason or the other.

How much was used to register these children and how will this investment by the taxpayer is to be safeguarded? What is going wrong? Is the education structure appropriate? What remedies are being put in place to ensure this type of internal inefficiency does not recur? Who are the quality assurance officers who ensured standards were maintained for the twelve years the children were in school?

Why was the speech of the Cabinet Secretary not nuanced to indicate solutions and point towards the future rather than issuing edicts that have no policy backing and lie nowhere in the national education strategy?

We need to find a way of keeping the public good that education is of good quality, affordable and accessible to all citizens. Equity should and must remain the fulcrum upon which the framing and realization of our education system should rotate.

— The writer is a trained teacher and a policy expert –  [email protected]