South Africa has one of the worst-performing education systems in the world, plagued by incompetence and corruption, and the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) is calling for the head of the minister of basic education, among other things.
The CDE released several reports on South Africa’s education system, outlining its failings, the factors responsible, and recommendations for the actions that need to be taken to improve education in the country.
“The President speaks of a ‘silent revolution’, while the minister talks of a ‘system on the rise’. The truth is that we face a silent crisis in our schools: South Africa has one of the worst performing education systems in the world,” said CDE’S Executive Director Ann Bernstein.
South Africa devotes a significant proportion of government revenue to basic education – roughly 13%, noted the report.
To justify such outlays in the context of rising fiscal pressures in 2023, we should expect globally competitive learning levels, a reduction in learning inequality, new opportunities for children from poor households, and a large, trainable workforce.
However, Bernstein said that, in reality, very little of this is evident.
Levels of education are circling the drain
According to professor Lant Pritchett, a specialist in education reform, South Africa is the single biggest learning underperformer relative to GDP per capita among low and middle-income countries.
South Africa does worse than Kenya or Tanzania, which have a GDP per capita of less than one-fifth of South Africa. The report states that our spending commitments are equivalent to some high-performing Scandinavian countries, but our learning outcomes are worse than neighbouring Eswatini.
To put it into perspective, the distance between our performance and Singapore’s, one of the world’s richest and best learning-outcome performers, is equivalent to “a whole generation of schooling loss”.
This is evident in the several international benchmark assessments South Africa have participated in over the past two decades, with some of the most notable results being:
- After a year of school, more than 50% of Grade 1 learners don’t know all the letters in the alphabet.
- 78% of Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning in any language.
- Out of 39 participating countries, South Africa’s Grade 9 learners – on a test designed for Grade 8s – placed 38th (second last) in mathematics proficiency and last place (39th) in science proficiency.
- Covid 19 lockdowns devastated learning in South Africa (as elsewhere). Experts believe the average 10-year-old knows less than the average 9-year-old before the pandemic.
Many countries poorer than South Africa outperform us in these tests, including Morocco, Egypt, Georgia, Kosovo and Albania.
The report noted, for example, that the typical Grade 6 child in Kenya is around two to three years of learning ahead of a Grade 6 learner in the Eastern Cape.
“South Africa’s comparative performance is shocking. When our learners take international tests, we are either last or in the bottom three countries. Even more devastating, while other countries test Grade 4s, we test Grade 5s; when they test Grade 8s, we test Grade 9s,” said Bernstein.
Quality of teachers and corruption
While the poverty of learners and their families and ongoing infrastructural deficits play a role, the report highlighted that a significant contribution to the state of education in South Africa is the quality of teachers and corruption within its system.
Two primary factors contribute to poor teaching levels. First, many teachers lack the capabilities (content knowledge and pedagogical skills) to teach better. The second is that a non-trivial number is unwilling to do so, said the report.
Four out of five teachers in public schools lack the content knowledge and pedagogical skills to teach their subjects.
In maths, for example, the proficiency levels of South African teachers (41%) rank far below that of their peers in Kenya (95%) and Zimbabwe (87%).
Moreover, the report revealed that 79% of Grade 6 maths teachers in the country scored below 60% on a Grade 6 maths test.
Compounding the issue is that South Africa has the highest teacher absenteeism rate of all SADC countries, which stood at 10% in 2017.
Corruption adds to the pile of obstacles in the education system’s way.
A report by the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (NEEDU), released in 2015, assessing rural literacy found extensive union involvement in corrupt teacher hiring and promotion processes.
This was known as the “jobs for cash” scandal, implicating SADTU – the country’s dominant teacher union – where members would coordinate to get favoured individuals onto the school governing body (SGB) to ensure those who paid for positions could land them.
The report noted examples of this in Kwa-Zulu Natal, where principal and deputy principal positions were routinely sold for between R30,000 and R45,000.
In 2016, the Miniter of education appointed a ministerial task team (MTT) to investigate the issue, which found that in six or possibly more of the nine provinces, SADTU was in charge of the management, administration and priorities of education in the country.
The MTT found that all deputy directors general of the DBE were SADTU members, frequently attending union meetings.
Despite findings of criminality by the MTT, no government official implicated in the 2014-2015′ jobs for cash’ scandals has been prosecuted or suspended, said Bernstein.
She added that not one of the key MTT recommendations to fight corruption and push back state capture has been implemented to this day.
CDE recommendations
CDE recommendations focus on five areas for action to improve education outcomes:
- Tackle corruption and state capture in education by prohibiting cadre deployment and introducing measures that remove SADTU’s stranglehold on education departments.
- Raise accountability levels by bringing back the Annual National Assessment (ANA) tests for Grades 1 to 9, reinvigorating an independent National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (NEEDU), and giving principals more power over the appointment and management of teachers in their schools.
- Improve teacher performance by introducing higher teacher training standards, more effective support for existing teachers and the urgent recruitment of skilled foreign teachers in areas of shortage (maths and science).
- Install fresh leadership in public education. South Africa needs a new Minister of Basic Education, DG and the top team at national and provincial levels to achieve systemwide reform. The President’s full support for tough political decisions is essential.
- Set realistic national and provincial performance goals. Stretch targets are required to move off the bottom of international tests. Ensuring all 10-year-olds can read for meaning by 2030 is another worthy goal, but a plan, a budget and regular reporting on progress must accompany this presidential aspiration dating back to 2019.
According to the report, evidence from global studies shows that successful reform programmes can start producing meaningful results in three to five years.
“The time has come for civil society, business, all political parties, parents and the public to up the pressure on government: we all need to push for systemwide reforms that significantly improve the quality of teaching in the classroom,” said Bernstein.
Source; https://businesstech.co.za/
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