Updated October 2026. October 2026: replaced the Millennium Development Goals and 'impending PISA' lines with SDG 4, OECD PISA 2022 and CSEC 2012-2023 evidence.
Jamaican boys' results have been argued over in staffrooms and in research for years. The 2020 post tied that debate to the Millennium Development Goals and to Jamaica's expected entry into the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The Goals closed in 2015. The education goal that replaced them is Sustainable Development Goal 4. Jamaica did take part in PISA. In the 2022 round, girls scored 13 points above boys in mathematics and 35 points above boys in reading.
The published research Carter was answering had little on teachers' own views, or on how school rules might shape boys' results. Teachers see large numbers of students every day. Her study asked them about boys' underachievement and about marginalisation, which she defined as being excluded or alienated.
The write-up does not give the number of teachers interviewed, the response rate, or the name of the school. Carter states that the findings may be specific to that one institution. Read them as what those teachers believed, not as a national measure.
Teachers in the study said boys' underachievement needed attention. Three points carried the summary.
They said most of the curriculum "does not appeal to boys and their masculinity". Carter notes that some literature agrees, and that the teachers' own idea of masculinity may be one of the limits on boys' results.
They said most students disciplined for dress-code breaches and for extreme violence were boys. Suspension, and expulsion in the worst cases, takes those students out of class. Lost contact time narrows the chance to catch up.
The same time-loss shows up in extracurricular activities. Some of the boys who take part are already behind, and inter-school competitions take them out of lessons.
On marginalisation, the teachers' account was that boys can be enrolled and still be shut out of the work that would help them achieve. Carter treated that as a risk to the wider economy if the school system is part of the exclusion. The study was not an argument against girls' results. Asked how to raise boys' achievement without cutting across girls, most of the teachers favoured single-gender classrooms. Some wanted curriculum topics that spoke to every gender.
Carter's closing point still holds. One school cannot settle an old problem. Wider work has since measured the gap she was describing. Using Ministry of Education records for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate from 2012 to 2023, Nicholas Wright finds that male candidates were about 8.5 percentage points less likely than female candidates to pass a given subject. On the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination for 2012-2016, the gap was about 6.6 percentage points (Economía LACEA Journal, 2024). In the 2026 Primary Exit Profile mathematics results, 64.9 per cent of girls reached the proficient band, compared with 57.2 per cent of boys (Jamaica Observer, 27 July 2026).
At the time of the 2020 post, Shari-Lee Carter had taught in Jamaican schools and was teaching English as a second language, from elementary to tertiary level, in Japan. She was a student at the University of Leicester, reading for an MA in International Education (Innovation and Reform). The original post spelled Leicester incorrectly. The 2020 page also pointed readers to a Balcostics Ed video of the interview. No video address is stored in the archived text, so none is added here.
Updated October 2026
- The Millennium Development Goals line is removed. Those goals ended in 2015. The education successor is SDG 4.
- "Impending" PISA is updated. Jamaica's PISA 2022 country note (OECD) gives girls a 13-point lead in mathematics and a 35-point lead in reading.
- A national exam gap is added from Wright (CSEC 2012-2023, about 8.5 percentage points) and from the 2026 PEP mathematics proficient band (Observer).
- The featured image file was named as a school photograph of boys. It is left off this page. No sample size has been added, because the 2020 summary did not report one.