Will 2006 go down in the history of South African education as the year in which the national government tried to wriggle out of responsibility for what is going on in our schools?
The question is provoked by Minister of Education Naledi Pandor’s curiously evasive performance when she released the matric results on Thursday last week. In particular, two major features of her televised address helped to create the impression that the national Education Department is a largely helpless (and hapless) observer of a situation that is beyond its control.
In the first place, she delivered varying degrees of ministerial rebuke to parents, teachers, school districts and provincial education departments for results that recorded a decline in the overall pass rate for the third year in a row. And secondly, having spent most of her speech analysing what the matric results tell us, she mysteriously concluded that doing so provides ‘a poor means of analysing our system. One point in a year cannot be used to assess the whole system of schoolingâ€.
On this second point, we should recall where Pandor’s argument comes from. Her predecessor, Kader Asmal, presided for five years over ludicrously implausible year-on-year increases in the matric pass rate, from 48,9% in 1999 to a gobsmacking high of 73,2% in 2003. His claims, cruder and more strident with every passing year, were that these vaulting increases showed the robustly growing health of the post-1994 government’s school system.
Initially, only a few dissidents pointed out that brutal tactics such as preventing borderline pupils from writing matric, or forcing them to take subjects on the standard grade, had far more to do with the soaring pass rate than did real educational achievement. But by 2003 minority dissidence had swelled to an unprecedented crescendo of public scepticism; perhaps not coincidentally, Asmal received the axe shortly thereafter.
Pandor has therefore precisely misapplied the originally dissident argument. It is not that matric results provide a poor means of analysing the system: they do so only if we make claims for the results that are not supported by evidence from elsewhere in the system. And from that point of view, the very detail that has caused so much public anguish and angry denunciation over the past 10 days — a 1,7% drop in passes to 66,6% — could just as well be read as a necessary, if painful, return to something closer to reality after the artificial inflations of the Asmal years.
After all, indicators other than matric pass rates continue to point to extremely low levels of educational achievement. International benchmarking, for instance, regularly assesses numeracy and literacy levels among our lower school grades as well below average.
This point brings us to Pandor’s diagnoses of why our system is faltering. She is surely correct to highlight provinces, school districts, teachers and parents; no one disagrees that what constitutes the school experience is multi-determined and so, very complex.
But two of the minister’s other criticisms of the system’s performance serve to raise questions about the extent to which the national government is indeed playing its part. Illustrating her contention that districts need to provide better support to schools she observed that the Namakwa district in the Northern Cape has merely 20 secondary schools to oversee, while the Capricorn district in Limpopo has a staggering 362.
It is dismaying, however, 12 years into our democratic dispensation, to hear a national education minister produce this figure with an air of discovery. School districts do not come about via acts of God: government officials draw lines on a map. And for years educationists have been sounding alarms about the functioning of districts, usually to deafening government silence.
The second example concerns the wretchedly low 2006 pass rates in higher grade maths and science — 4,8% and 5,6% respectively. Rather wanly, Pandor commented that ‘we will have to pay much closer attention to performance in these subjectsâ€.
But what ‘attention†exactly has the national government been paying for 10 years now regarding these subjects? Since 1997 the pass rate in maths has never exceeded 5,3%; in science over the same period the highest pass rate was a paltry 5,9%. After all, ‘national [government] is responsible for policy development, monitoring and support to ensure we achieve desired outcomes,†Pandor observed; yet what has its monitoring over 10 years in these two areas achieved?
The broad point is that, for years before Pandor assumed office, but also since then, the national government has consistently missed key chances to intervene effectively where it can most make a difference. Three instances are germane here. All educationists agree that children who receive well-supported pre-schooling programmes thrive when they get to school; yet the budget for this — namely, early childhood development — remains a derisory 1% of education spending. As a result, many poor children, who most need such programmes cannot be accommodated.
Equally, for pupils whom the school system has failed, adult education programmes should in theory be an option if they are not allowed to repeat matric, yet the budget for adult education remains at about 1%. Here too it is mainly poor pupils who are affected and so need this option, so why does this area remain such a low government priority?
Thirdly, the government last year missed a major opportunity to stem the growing losses in the teaching workforce when it allocated financing for only 1Â 400 teaching bursaries. The inadequacy of this is stark when one contemplates the figures: about 20Â 000 teachers leave the profession annually, yet universities produce only about 6Â 000 new teachers every year.
One might sympathise with Pandor’s desire, expressed last Thursday, to reduce what she called the ‘hype†of the announcement of matric results and to do away with the TV coverage. But even if that happens, she will still need to show us how the national minister intends to assume accountability for what happens in our schools.