/ 2 September 2011

Time for schools to be marked

A new website urges the public to take control of children's education.

President Jacob Zuma has called on teachers to be “in class, on time and teaching”. He felt the need to make this call despite an existing workload agreement that requires teachers to be in class for seven hours a day and, in addition, to spend at least another hour a day on “preparation and marking” — in total a working day of at least eight hours, for 180 days a year.

Clearly, school accountability is lacking when even the basic minimum terms of employment are not being complied with — and the poor results show it. My experience, from both sides of the fence, compels me to respond, in the interest of education.

In any system the state is unable to monitor compliance in every school every day. But in South Africa this is compounded by the deeply institutionalised culture of non-compliance that has been endemic in the system since before 1994. As a result teachers are absent without good reason, some arrive late or leave early, and others are perhaps at school but not in class. Funerals, council duties and union meetings provide convenient excuses, Fridays become “early closing” days and on paydays non-attendance is the norm in many schools. Pupils display similar traits and principals and parents are unable or unwilling to ­exercise authority.

And so disruptions to the rhythm of schooling become commonplace and the scheduled 180 schooldays a year, let alone the eight hours a day, are badly eroded. Those who do teach are often underprepared for their teaching tasks and sometimes stay in class for only 10 minutes before setting work and getting back into the staffroom.

Sub-standard schools
But the state has no effective way of knowing this at present and is unlikely to in the near future. As a result, many of our schools fail to reach the desired standards. So I believe other mechanisms are required if we want our education performance to improve.

This is why I have launched a website called The School Inspector (www.theschoolinspector.co.za). It is now time for the public to be put back into public schools and for parents, students and members of the community to serve as the eyes and ears of the state, as well as to demand greater accountability from our public servants, including teachers, ­principals and other officials.

School communities must serve as The School Inspector — they live in the area, they are at the school regularly, they know and talk about what is going on. This website is a simple mechanism for them to tell us what they know. It is free from any of the power relations that surround a school, where parents may be intimidated by teachers and where children may be scared of victimisation if they report an incident.

The great thing is that The School Inspector will not operate in terms of any labour relations legislation or collective agreement, so the “school inspections” will not be negotiated or rule-bound in terms of when and how they should take place. They will be done in the public eye and the only censure would be that of the court of public opinion.
So there will be no lengthy disciplinary procedures, no obligation to “first give an opportunity for development” before imposing any sanction. Underperforming individuals and schools must be publicly disgraced — the time for excuses is over.

Bureaucratic accountability in schools has been vigorously resisted. Repeated attempts by various education ministers to introduce formal accountability measures, to ensure effective monitoring, have been resisted by unions and eroded to the point of being ineffective.

Strong measures have been watered down by “development
The history of accountability systems, notably development appraisal, whole school evaluation and the integrated quality management system, has shown how strong measures such as these have been watered down by a focus on “development”, which renders the approach toothless. The planned introduction of performance-related pay for teachers, provided for in the first occupation-specific dispensation agreement in 2009, was removed at the insistence of unions, with the outcome that the worst teacher in a school gets the same salary increase as the hardest-working one.

The National Education Evaluation and Development Unit, currently under construction in the basic education department, is unlikely to escape this fate. Recently, the minister confirmed that she is not planning to introduce a school inspectorate, despite its obvious need and popular appeal. But this is understandable: in the current climate it is unlikely that unions will ever agree to any instrument that actually does what is needed — to identify and reward good teachers and sanction the bad ones.

And so The School Inspector has stepped into this space, by moving accountability outside of the highly regulated sphere of government and unions and into the free space of public opinion — a democratic form of accountability. Teachers may not like it, but I am sure parents and governing bodies will certainly appreciate the opportunity.

Without such an instrument, we will continue with the pattern whereby good schools continue to provide quality education while bad schools hold long-suffering communities to ransom, with arrogant and lazy teachers exploiting weak management and poor leadership. All parents want a good education for their children, but most are held hostage by a political impasse that undermines any effort to distinguish between good and bad teachers and schools, and to take the necessary action (whether developmental or disciplinary).

Members of the public can participate
The School Inspector will serve as a space for the public to comment on and rate schools, on a confidential (but not anonymous) basis. This is an attempt to build on the current call for greater public service accountability and provide a means by which ordinary members of the public can participate in holding our public schools accountable by commenting on and rating them. These comments and ratings should encourage schools to continually improve to meet the ultimate test of public acclaim and the initiative is therefore developmental in nature.

The system will work much like many popular websites that rate hotels, restaurants and other services. It will draw on any data that is available, such as matric pass rates or the results of the annual national assessments in primary schools, but will also look at more subjective ­elements such as values.

The site provides three categories for public inputs: the quality of teaching, the effectiveness of school organisation and the promotion of constitutional principles and values — and schools will be rated in all of these areas. The School Inspector will moderate all comments and scores and provide a fair assessment of the performance of the school in relation to its facilities and resources. This then becomes the basis for ­ranking the school.

In this initiative the domain of public opinion becomes the arbiter and driver of quality — enough consensus about a school (good or bad) must carry some weight, which the school will have to take account of. This will take the matter out of any labour relations or other negotiable spaces, allowing for honest (and critical) judgments to be made, where necessary, without these being tempered by developmental concerns, labour disputes or suchlike.

Good schools and good teachers will surely welcome the initiative; poorly performing schools will have good reason to be concerned. But in this case they will have no basis for resisting it and no power to pervert it. Parents, teachers and pupils will always be proud of a good school and will strive to improve its rating. Hopefully, bad schools will be embarrassed by a poor rating and take steps to improve. The School Inspector will therefore enable the public to re-establish its authority over public schools and give schools opportunities to improve.

I am confident that my experience as a union leader, a school governing body chairperson and a senior government official will enable me to provide an impartial opinion on the performance of any school and I encourage the public to participate in this.

Contact The School Inspector on 076 644 4408.

Duncan Hindle was elected president of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union in 1995. He joined the department of education in 1996. He served as a deputy director general and, from 2005 to 2009, as director general. His involvement in The School Inspector site is in his private capacity.