COMPUTERIZED SCHOOLS SELECTION AND PLACEMENT SYSTEM (CSSPS):

We in MOVE, express our deep disappointment at managers of the program, the education ministry and government over this terrible and negative circumstance we find ourselves in today. This year's management of the Computerized Schools Selection and Placement System has proven to be a highly confusing system for Ghanaian parents and anxious students who believing to have done their best responsibilities in securing recommendable grades. But they have been met with serious disappointment and questionable leadership from an administration that has been simply inept at playing their part of the responsibilities.

The Problem.
The CSSPS is a system premised on the poor thinking of our leadership and national managers. This thinking is guarantees that if a child gets bad grades in his BECE exams, his life must be relegated to a cycle of poor quality schools, to get further acquire poor WASSCE grades, and ultimately lose out on the opportunity to attain a tertiary education. Why must an educational system write of a young 13 or 14 year old for the rest of his life because he couldn't pass a BECE exam? Why must an educational system make it harder for a comparatively weak student to get the best help?

It is this poor thinking behind the CSSSPS that should be the target of everybody's concern. Computers are not human beings. Human beings make computers. All things being equal, a faulty computer system is a result of faulty human thinking. This lack of credible idea coupled with a simple premise: everybody wants their ward to have access to quality education within the context of severe infrastructure limitations, is what has generated this nightmare for parents and heartache for our dear students. It is a strong sign of stagnation that the best schools of the sixties are still the best school of 2011 simply because they have the best teaching and learning facilities.

What the NPP and NDC have done over the years is to do everything about the educational problem except to solve it. Under NPP, Former President Kufour added a year without adding the necessary blocks. Under NDC, Mills reversed the four-year duration to three years without reversing the poor quality of teaching and both have presided over terrible loopholes in CSSPS after five years of implementation without tightening inherent weaknesses in the system.

Ghanaians, these are the kind of parties and people who are looking for your mandate next election. These are the kind of thinking that will want with the blessing of Ghanaians, to rule this country; anti-developmental, short-sighted, unimaginative, and close-circuited in their ideas.

The Way Forward.
• Our research has concluded that out of the $176m presidential palace, plus the $37m dollars of presidential jet, a common six classroom block costing 100,000 dollars could have built over 2,130 six-classroom blocks. This means each of the 474 SHS could have gotten four more six-unit classroom block. There are 474 SHS in ghana and if a six-unit classroom block can house 160 more students, then all together we could have admitted over 56,800 more students under the CSSPS. What this means is that this year 56,800 more young children will stay home because NDC and NPP leadership prefer comfort to classroom, personal priorities to national priorities.

• Today, distance learning has become a useful tool for providing access to quality education. Why must over 900 students gather and crowd themselves on a piece of infrastructure in order to access quality training. A visionary political leadership would be looking at how to encourage distance learning and the use of ICT in providing secondary school education.

• We also call for the abolition of the 30% quota for candidates leaving in a preferred school's catchment area. Ghana is a unitary state not a federal system. Give children regional advantages will kill their ability to think national. Young children will begin to owe some stronger allegiance to their regions or hometowns that could undermine allegiance to the nation. It is sending a very wrong message to these fertile minds. Nkrumah's era made a systematic attempt to blend cultures by encouraging an accra-based student to school in the north and vice-versa. The reality is also that it has been subject to abuse, bribery, and corruption.

• Finally we have to reject the leadership of the NPP and NDC, in favour of the CPP. The party's policy statement on education is a marvelous blueprint on how we can develop a world class educational system. The CPP has shown true leadership in policy and if indeed elections is a context of ideas, the CPP idea remains to date the most forwarding looking in comparison to the politics of trivialities between the NDC and the NPP.

Mr. Edwin Appiah
Spokesperson (MOVEGHANA)
Masses Organised to Vote and Emancipate Ghana
0266 731 420