No one can dispute the fact that the past has a lot to do with the mess our education system is in today. But when four years of democratic governance have gone by and conditions in most schools are as bad as ever, if not worse, it’s time to acknowledge that mistakes have been made by this government and that new approaches and new leadership are called for.
June 16 always reminds us of the children who died for their education. It’s 22 years later and a new generation of children are not much better off. The education crisis is as real now as it was then.
We have a situation where the teacher salary bill is too high; where some provinces, plagued by maladministration, corruption and inefficiency, can’t even pay for their own offices, let alone stationery and textbooks for learners; where teachers are undertrained and demotivated; and where parents who can afford to are pulling their children out of local schools and in many cases fleeing the state system.
Lots of back-patting went on between teacher unions and the government when teacher salaries were given a healthy hike in the agreement known as Resolution Three of 1996.
Many in the government were former unionists themselves and everyone seemed to be speaking the same language: there weren’t too many teachers, they were simply in the wrong places.
Just move them around a bit and, hey presto, all will be sorted out and past wrongs will be righted in the bargain. Give badly needed human resources to disadvantaged rural and urban schools and send those recalcitrant teachers who won’t move packing with some cash.
The disasters and bunglings around the implementation of this agreement are now well known. Provinces saw a chance to save some money. They granted huge packages to every teacher who applied for them.
They weren’t necessarily to blame for seizing the moment to cut their salary bills. The hiked salaries meant they had no money left over for anything else. So we lost some of our best teachers – principals, deputies, heads of department, maths and science teachers.
Then schools appointed new temporary teachers to fill key posts while those teachers declared in excess waited at home for the phone call that never came.
Redeployment just didn’t happen. The government blames the Grove Primary School court challenge as the reason, but, in fact, officials in the department were privately admitting ages before that happened that redeployment wasn’t going to happen. There just wasn’t enough money, they said.
No one publicly faced up to the inevitable consequence of salary hikes: less teachers. They were too busy being friendly to each other.
Meanwhile, a ”double-parking” situation arose where new temporary teachers were being paid as well as those waiting on redeployment lists. The system became more bloated than ever and the salary bill grew even bigger. Poor schools got poorer, provinces ran into more debt and educational publishers started retrenching staff as orders for textbooks trickled to a halt.
Now things have come to a head: although it looks like the nationwide strike has been averted, large-scale job losses still appear to be an inevitability in the not-too-distant future. As it is, schools have experienced disruptions as a result of the partial industrial action this week – disruptions we can ill afford, given last year’s appalling matric results and our terminally ill culture of learning and teaching.
It’s easy to see all the mistakes in hindsight, but what should in fact have happened?
There’s a phrase doing the rounds in government corridors that, crude as it may sound, resonates with truth: many teachers are being paid First World salaries for delivering a Third World service.
If a massive teacher training and appraisal system had been implemented from the word go, if teachers had been given intensive and basic training and had their salaries linked to their performance in the classroom, then the non-performing teachers would have been sent home, freeing up the budget for other resources.
That way, teachers would have been motivated to embark on training – not the kind of paper-chase stuff of the past that gave them more money for every new certificate they could wave in front of them, but the kind of basic training that produces results, results which can be evaluated by simple performance indicators like arriving for school on time and teaching with discipline and commitment.
A credible ”peer appraisal” system was negotiated aeons ago in the Education Labour Relations Council, but nothing has happened to introduce this, let alone make the crucial connection between performance and pay.
Who can blame teachers for wanting to strike? They’ve been messed around, strung along and hoodwinked.
What’s worse, they’ve been told to acquaint themselves with an entirely new language to teach in – Curriculum 2005 – when most do not even feel competent or skilled enough to do ”chalk-and-talk” teaching in the first place. It’s like being made to carry a boulder when you can’t even walk properly. No wonder they have nightmares about it.
The millions spent on grandiose launches and training for the new curriculum could have been put to better use on basic training. Aspects of the new approach may be sound, but they should be phased in far more gradually. To ”implement” outcomes-based education is to do the opposite of what the theorists behind it intended.
Lastly, if the Constitution had been amended long ago when the contradictions around provincial versus national powers in education first arose, Minister of Education Sibusiso Bengu would not still be saying: ”It’s not my problem. It’s the province’s.” We’re all sick to death of hearing that.
We’re also sick of hearing the long list of policy achievements rattled off defensively in moments of crisis. When Deputy Director General of Education Ihron Rensburg was asked on TVrecently whether all the grand policies devised by the government had made a scrap of difference in township schools, he was at a loss for words – because the answer was ”no”.
It’s easy to criticise and difficult to make things happen. In fairness, some education leaders have at least acknowledged some of the many problems. But it’s time they stopped lurching from crisis to crisis and casting blame elsewhere. It’s time they took some basic, pro-active steps.
Dean of education at the University of Durban-Westville, Professor Jonathan Jansen, is right when he says it’s not about money. It’s about mustering some political will to make things better on the ground.
Research has shown time and again that you don’t need vast resources for effective learning and teaching to take place. It’s a simple, basic thing that everyone wants and deserves. And 22 years after children died for it, shouldn’t they at last be getting it?
Philippa Garson is editor of The Teacher, a Mail & Guardian publication
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