The reports from Ascot Primary School should trouble anyone who believes school is meant to lift a child rather than rank one. At the Portmore institution’s graduation, Grade Six pupils deemed not “proficient” in this year’s Primary Exit Profile were stripped of the cap and gown, dressed in uniform, marched behind their gowned classmates, and seated at the back. Their parents were offered a cheaper package, as though the children themselves had been discounted.

“Graduation apartheid,” the headlines said. The description fits. But the apartheid did not begin in that tent, and it will not end with the principal’s apology, already dismissed by one parent as hollow.

For a quarter-century, Jamaica has pretended to dismantle this machinery. Common Entrance was abolished in 1999 after the country acknowledged the harm of sorting children in a single morning. GSAT followed, then PEP, promising a fuller profile of the child. Three names, one unbroken architecture. The exam changed; the hierarchy remained.