CDE calls for school voucher system for SA
South Africa should embark on a school voucher experiment to improve the quality of education available to the poor, the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) said on Wednesday.
CDE executive director Ann Bernstein explained that in the US, large-scale experiments with school vouchers — coupons issued by the state or private charities entitling poor parents to send their children to non-state schools — have had impressive results.
The CDE has released a new report comprehensively reviewing the experience of vouchers in America.
Nearly all voucher recipients have been poor and mainly African-American. After switching from a state school to a voucher-funded school, the average improvement in academic performance experienced by voucher-funded children
ranges between 3-6% over two years.
Five years of voucher-funded education could improve someone’s marks from just scraping a pass to earning a B average, or from failing badly to passing well, said the CDE.
America’s voucher programmes have also helped improve the quality of education available in nearby state schools. In Arizona, public school districts that were losing pupils to voucher-funded schools have begun to ask parents why they are using vouchers to remove their children, and to try to improve the education they provide. In Florida, even the ‘threat’ of a state-funded voucher programme being introduced led to dramatic improvements in 78 failing public schools.
”The similarities with South Africa are striking,” said Bernstein. ”South Africans have enjoyed a decade of political freedom, but far too many of us are still unable to ”read the menu.” According to the Department of Education’s own figures, the average reading and writing score in Grade 3 is 39%. The average maths score is 30%. And close to 60% of pupils are reported to drop out before matric. And yet, South Africa spends a higher percentage of its GDP on education that any other middle-income developing country.”
Bernstein added: ”The state must pay for children’s education but new questions should be asked concerning how we spend that money. Surely it is clear by now that simply throwing more and more money at our struggling government schools isn’t working. The time has come for some ”out of the box” thinking about how to spend our education budget.”
”It’s time for a South African experiment with school vouchers. We need to test whether they will have the same beneficial effects in our country as they have had in America.”
”Which province or city will be the first to make this bold move and provide poor children stuck in failing schools with the opportunity to go to the same good schools that middle class pupils already attend? Surely an election year is the perfect time to adopt an initiative guaranteed to win so many votes?”
Bernstein also challenged corporate South Africa, as companies have a long tradition of generous, imaginative corporate social responsibility spending.
”Is there a company which would like to add yet more value to its social spending on education by offering vouchers that could be spent at any approved private school rather than just the traditional scholarships to a specific school? This would benefit individual voucher recipients, inject more competition into the education market, and start gathering evidence on whether voucher systems can have the same beneficial effects in South Africa as they have in the USA,” she said.
”A school voucher experiment could really benefit our whole education system,” the CDE concluded. – I-Net Bridge