The Education Laws Amendment Bill currently before Parliament is clear proof that Minister of Education Naledi Pandor’s commitment to quality education is empty rhetoric, DA education spokesperson Helen Zille said on Sunday.
The key clauses in the Bill make race the most important criterion in the appointment of teachers, and actually prevent schools from appointing the best candidate for vacant teaching posts.
Said Zille in a statement: ”When we look back in 10 years’ time, the decline of quality in the public education system will be the government’s greatest single failure in our new democracy.”
If the Bill is passed into law, it will be the most significant single cause of this decline.
”This Bill will have such profound implications for education that it should elicit mass resistance from everyone with an interest in education: principals, professional teachers, governing bodies, parents, tertiary institutions and civil society as a whole,” Zille said.
The Bill requires school governing bodies to recommend three applicants, in order of preference, for each vacancy at the school, but requires the head of the provincial department to override this recommendation if it is not based on the criteria of ”equity, redress and representivity”.
The Bill makes no mention of factors such as competence, quality or ability, Zille said.
”The DA fully supports the goal of transforming the poor quality of education currently available in the poorest schools.
”This Bill will not help to achieve this objective, which should be the minister’s key priority if she is serious about quality in education.
”On the contrary, it will achieve the opposite: it will destroy the remaining quality in the public education system, without doing anything at all to improve the pitiful quality of education in many disadvantaged schools.”
Instead of making race the criterion for teacher appointments, the government should encourage the best teachers to teach in the most disadvantaged schools through real incentives, particularly increased salary offers.
”Instead of encouraging and rewarding competence and quality, the Bill makes these attributes irrelevant in the filling of teaching posts.”
The Bill will perpetuate a funding model that discriminates against good schools that admit poor children.
”In this way, the Bill will make it increasingly difficult for poor children to gain access to good schools, fundamentally undermining the rights of these children,” Zille said.
The Bill entrenches a funding formula that will pour further millions into precisely those schools from which parents are seeking to remove their children, while those schools facing increased demands for access will actually lose money.
”Poor children will be trapped in the weakest schools that continue to get weaker largely because of poor management and weak teaching.
”If there is one key lesson we have learnt in education in the past 10 years, it is this: pouring money into badly managed, inefficient and incompetent schools does nothing to improve their quality.” — Sapa