The Big Read:Wrecking ball fixes nothing
Aug 8, 2014 | Jonathan Jansen
In the past week, two major proposals were floated in the media for addressing the
quality of education in our schools - the one very good and the other a potential
disaster.
WORKING TOGETHER: When a man's leg slipped between a train carriage and the platform at a station in
Perth, Australia, his fellow passengers tilted the carriage to free him. Similarly, education in South Africa will
improve only if the teachers' unions and the government pull their weight Picture: YOUTUBE
Prof Jonathan Jansen. File photo
Photograph by: Times LIVE
"Can Motshekga take on unions and win? Do not hold your breath"
The good proposal comes from The Ministerial Task Team Report on the National Senior
Certificate.
It proposes that life orientation no longer be required for examination purposes, that the pass
requirement for degree studies excludes the 30% option, that all schools offer real
mathematics, and that only markers who are proved competent be appointed.
In other words, the task team recommends a modest but important rise in the educational
standards of the final years of schooling. This is what I call common sense, the kind of
thinking that most South Africans have already called for, and would support.
Although these proposals mercifully point us in the right direction, they are timid and one can
only hope that Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga goes beyond the cautious
approach of the task team.
Make 50% the pass rate for all subjects and phase it in over three years; school systems
have the remarkable capacity to adjust to external realities.
Drop life orientation altogether - when you make the subject non-examinable, it loses all
meaning for students. Rather develop a "life orientation perspective" in the teaching of all
subjects.
Fix the root of the mathematics problem, which is the shaky foundations of numeracy in the
lower grades.
Simply requiring schools to offer maths does not mean more than a few will take it and pass
it in the disadvantaged schools.
Here, nevertheless, is a test of political courage for Motshekga. Will she be able to take on
the teachers' unions and insist, for example, that every marker be competent in the subject
matter and be selected on that basis alone?
Having observed these kinds of political entanglements from close quarters, I advise that
you do not hold your breath.
The disastrous proposal comes from the red-hot MEC for education in Gauteng, Panyaza
Lesufi. I share his passion for equity in the schools system; it is simply unacceptable to have
such visible inequalities between rich and poor schools.
We should contemplate radical measures to change that, urgently. But merging two schools
so that they have one headship and one bank account, and shared facilities, such as
laboratories, will have only one effect - it will drop the quality of both schools in the
partnership.
Why? Because schools are fragile organisations, as we reported in our research for the book
Diversity High: Class, colour, character and culture in a South African high school.
So how does this happen? The middle-class children leave, white and black. In their
calculation, the parents pay for quality and, the truth is, on balance most of these well-off
public schools run on private monies, not state funding.
Expect a small then rapid drift of these students to the burgeoning private sector and to
schools unaffected by the mergers. You would then be left with a clientele that can't raise
funds to maintain expensive sports fields, run labs or pay additional teachers. This is what
Lesufi in his political zeal cannot see, and for which he will not have to be accountable when
the disaster strikes - remember outcomes-based education?
Then there are practical issues. Try to share a science laboratory between two schools. As a
teacher I had to run my classes before and after school to enable children of one school to
do the full complement of biology practicals in a disadvantaged school.
With Lesufi's plan, there are no logistics to think about, let alone the doubling of costs for dry
and wet materials, or maintenance and lab assistants. Consider libraries and sports fields
and the challenge is insurmountable.
The way to establish quality education for all our children is to find the money and invest the
funds in disadvantaged schools to build and maintain quality infrastructure while attracting
the best teachers from all our schools.
Do not break down schools that work, white or black; they need support not pressure, or
they, too, will collapse. There are no shortcuts to building quality schools.
I do not expect the plan for school mergers to work. Apart from the inevitable legal
challenges that will follow, it is not in the interests of the political classes. I cannot imagine a
single member of the cabinet, or Lesufi himself, wanting his children, who sit in privileged
schools, merging with a poor school with one bank account.
~oOo~