Phillipa Garson
CLASS STRUGGLE
It will be interesting to see whether Western Cape’s education MEC Helen Zille’s ambitious plan to improve schools’ performance reaps rewards. Zille may speak for the Democratic Party, but her policies are not so far removed from those of the national government, which is also introducing evaluation schemes to turn non- performing schools around. With matric exemptions declining every year, and universities and technikons bereft of students to fill their lecture halls and pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, it’s not surprising there is a note of rising panic: after years of restructuring, new legislation and ever-new policies, the education system still refuses to improve.
At least, as one educationist pointed out, the emphasis has finally moved away from political rhetoric to the discourse of learning and teaching, accompanied by a frantic search for new ways of doing things, such as introducing sticks and carrots into the delivery equation.
The national Deparment of Education is to set up crack teams in each of the provinces to evaluate schools’ performances and will appoint 200 supervisors to do the unenviable task of turning non-performing schools into performing ones. These teams are supposed to be in place by early next year. Gauteng has already set up its own system whereby special teams are focusing on the worst-performing schools that are achieving between 100% and 80% failure rates.
Zille will be sending assessment packages to each of the Western Cape’s schools, which will be expected to show their performance and efficiency rates according to indicators such as time management, subject choices, governance and management procedures. Schools that improve will be rewarded with additional resources and training of staff, while those that continue to do badly will be punished with the dismissal or transfer of staff or the loss of certain management functions.
The question is, will any of these grand plans do the trick?
Zille’s plan has come in for criticism: some blanche at the punitive aspect; others believe the scheme will simply increase the divide between rich and poor schools – the latter, just struggling to get through each day, will battle to fill out the lengthy forms, let alone manage to meet any of the requirements specified in them. Zille counters that schools will be assessed relative to their socio-economic circumstances and they will receive real incentives for improvement and penalities for continued poor performance measured over a sustained period. This will be the most effective way of decreasing the divide between the haves and the have-nots, she says.
Zille is right when she says there is no point to simply pouring money into non- functioning schools. It is also high time that schools had some incentives dangled before them to encourage them to turn themselves around. But just how such a complicated scheme will ever deliver remains to be seen.
It is clear that none of these performance- oriented schemes will have the desired impact until the missing link in the education delivery chain is fixed at the district level and schools are given ongoing, structured support in the form of real people from their local district offices. The central role of districts in supporting schools has been sorely neglected in the post-apartheid era. Ever since inspectors were chased out of schools in the struggle days, district officials have laboured with this stigma, often enough perpetuated by unions.
Now, when schools need all the help they can get, they are out in the wilderness. Thanks to the Schools Act and its romantic notions about schools governing themselves, schools must mind their own business – literally.
Meanwhile, the country’s 167 districts and the critical interface between schools and provinces are being neglected. They are operating at 50% capacity with almost half their posts empty; they have no resources to give schools the support they need. While district subject advisors should be being taught the new curriculum so they can help teachers along, they do not even know, in many instances, what the new curriculum is. They are simply being bypassed in the training exercise. It should be their task to evaluate and support schools and teachers’ performances, based on the far more progressive evaluation tool we now have, but they are being completely overlooked and as a result, no evaluation is taking place.
Instead of plying schools with yet more work to do, as Zille’s plan suggests, they should be given more help. Schools in the meantime labour on in isolation, expected to perform miracles. And as long as schools are not given the help they need on an ongoing and regular basis they will continue to disappoint.
ENDS