Toxic mix

By Graeme Bloch

Shocking findings show that South African learners are consistently underachieving, counting not only amongst the worst in the world, but often amongst the worst in Africa. Education policy expert Graeme Bloch states that 60-80% of our schools are dysfunctional. They produce barely literate and numerate learners and Bloch believes the country is headed for a national education crisis. He identifies the toxic mix of factors that are causing this crisis, taking government and teachers to task for not performing as they should and highlighting the socio-economic challenges that many learners face.But Bloch doesn’t leave it at that – he offers solutions to turn the situation around. He gives anecdotal evidence of several schools and individual teachers who are getting it right, leaving the reader with hope for the future.This book will speak to parents, teachers and anyone concerned about the future of the country. It is a powerful call to action.Onderwyskenner Graeme Bloch identifiseer die gevaarlike kombinasie van faktore wat veroorsaak dat ons skoolstelsel nie werk nie. Hy klim onder andere kaalvuis onder die departement van onderwys in. Bloch bied egter ook oplossings aan om die situasie om te keer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781920323653

Book preview

The Toxic Mix blurb

. . . international tests suggest that South African schools are among the world’s worst . . .

Education in South Africa is a national disaster. Respected educationist Graeme Bloch faces the crisis head-on in this account of the toxic mix of factors responsible for our failed schools. He takes government to task for its role and analyses what has gone wrong with teachers and their support systems.

But Bloch also holds up some shining examples of schools that are getting it right through commitment and good leadership. He not only identifies the problems but clearly suggests how to fix these. The Toxic Mix is a powerful call to action.

(The book) speaks to an issue at the core of South Africa’s tragic failure to transform the inherited education system into one that provides the sure and tested route out of poverty.

– Dr Mamphela Ramphele

The Toxic Mix will make a lot of sense to ordinary South Africans struggling to understand why a nation that spends more (as a percentage of GDP) on school education than any other African state, has the worst results to show for such investment.

– Prof Jonathan Jansen

About the author

Graeme Bloch is an education policy analyst at the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). He taught in the education faculty at the University of the Western Cape and was project manager for youth development at the Joint Education Trust.

He is a graduate of the University of Cape Town where he specialised in economic history. He is a member of the UCT Council, serves as director on the Lafarge Education Trust and is a judge in the Impumelelo Innovation Awards.

Bloch has worked as head of Social Development in the Department of Welfare, and as Director of Social Development in the Joburg Metro. Before 1994, he was executive member of the National Education Crisis Committee (NECC) as well as the United Democratic Front (UDF). For his involvement in the democratic movement he was detained and arrested numerous times, and he was banned from 1976–81.

He has published a number of books and articles about education.

Contents

Author’s note

List of abbreviations

1. Facing up to the crisis

2. Scars from the past

3. What is wrong in our schools?

4. The toxic mix: who is to blame?

5. Schools getting it right

6. A map for the future

7. The right mix

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

To Cheryl

Author’s note

We could fill this book with facts and figures. There are plenty to highlight the South African education system’s inadequacies. These figures are often included in international comparisons, whether under acronyms like PIRLS or TIMMS or SACMEQ, or by any of the Grade 3 or 6 systemic evaluations for literacy, numeracy and science that the education department has instituted – all of which show that South African children are very far from achieving their full potential.

There are plenty of tables and figures that constitute the evidence on which this book is based. There are details of pass rates, numbers in school, numbers matriculating, teacher training graphs, and so on. Often the evidence is not complete, it is worth saying. There are many statistical gaps in information, and there is no point in hiding this or pretending that we know it all.

Despite these gaps, taken together, using different kinds of angles to confirm the findings, and drawing also on the experience of those in the field, it is still possible to draw quite clear conclusions about why our schools are failing.

There is much qualitative evidence, too, which means that many angles are possible and different stories can be told. There are often both negatives and positives, problems solved and new problems and challenges created or discovered. Stories need to be told, such as of the fantastic amalgamation of fourteen different apartheid education departments into one national department with provincial counterparts. There is the complex story of the reallocation of spend, from richer to poorer schools and between provinces, to begin to redress historical backlogs and inequalities. There is the policy emphasis on fixing the poorer township and rural schools.

We can drill down to specific policies such as the institution of quintiles, or breaking schools down into five groups, based on (surmised) wealth categories of various schools and what this has meant. Fee-free schooling, or maintaining schools that may charge fees, are not simple and one-dimensional choices without consequences and contradictions. For many of the figures, it is up to a point a case of which ‘facts’ you choose, how you arrange them, and how you decide to tell the story of education. Yet all the stories in these pages attest to the single fact that the vast majority of South African schools are underperforming abysmally.

What follows will rest on sound academic analysis, research and information. It is not my intention to present this in a boring or repetitive way. It is certainly not my intention to be ‘academic’ in the way that many people unfortunately understand this – up in the air, tendentious, always quoting some authority. I am not trying to prove an academic point or make a controversial point among researchers. Rather, I want to use research and the best of academia to make some clear policy propositions. Conclusions must be based on good information and well-analysed data and evidence.

It is thus my job as author to explore the academic literature and to make sure that this book reflects the latest findings and research. On the one hand, then, I am very conscious of the need to have evidence, facts and figures, and a clear analysis on which to rest the credibility and integrity of the book. On the other hand, it is the book’s job to sift through the drama and the debate so that the reader may be presented with clear choices and can clearly decide. Academic research must help us cut through complexity as well as help us confront the unpalatable truths.

While I have read quite widely, there is also a small and particular number of texts on which this book will lean heavily. These texts are partly useful precisely because they themselves summarise many of the debates and the state of consensus in the education field.

The first much-used book will be the UNESCO Education for All publication. Secondly, I will draw on a book that I was involved in editing recently. If I say so myself, it is really the only text that puts together concisely and clearly the recent experience of South African education change and education financing choices. Investment Choices for South African Education draws on both international experience and the post-apartheid period to give a system-wide analysis of investment options and expenditure choices in education. It provides some of the more up-to-date analysis of problems in education post-apartheid. It points directly to some of the critical reasons for the identified failings.

In the same year that this book came out, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also published a major Reviews of National Policies for Education in South Africa that summarises much of the recent evidence on South African education outcomes in particular. It is not necessary always to claim to have done tons of original research. Rather, the OECD report has put together the best findings and figures and helped to arrange them so that we can draw proper conclusions. It seems wasteful and only duplicating unnecessarily to go and redo all the research work that the OECD has gathered, brought together and synthesised so well.

It should also be clear that many arguments will rest on the work of education researchers and policy pioneers who went before. Some of their names are familiar in policy debates in South Africa today. Their rich history of original research and their more academic contributions are not always known and can usefully be acknowledged.

These names include academics such as Linda Chisholm, Jonathan Jansen and Peter Kallaway (all professors), whose bold analysis and consistent critical debate over the years have kept issues of education in the academic and public eye. I obviously borrow heavily from a number of them at different times, but hope I acknowledge them properly where relevant, according to the required conventions. Certainly to borrow can never allow one to plagiarise.

The ideas in this book, and the conceptions of education and where and how it fits into society, are clearly my own. This framework of assumptions will affect the analysis of what has gone wrong in our schools and why. This book is not shy to draw its own clear conclusions, based on its own interpretations of the data and the literature. I am responsible for these choices.

List of abbreviations

1  Facing up to the crisis

South African children are routinely underachieving – not only among the worst in the world, but often among the worst in the southern African region and in Africa as a whole. This is despite vastly superior resources in Africa’s most industrialised nation.

There is a great divide between a small minority of schools that are doing OK and the vast majority that are in trouble. Even given the many achievements of post-apartheid democracy, this single sad theme of underperformance will not be hidden by different ways of reflecting on the truth. The stark reality is that some 60–80% of schools today might be called dysfunctional.

There is no shortage of evidence showing how badly the South African education system is performing. International comparisons evaluating literacy, numeracy and science ability clearly show that South African children are not getting it. All the stories in this book confirm the sorry tale of how poorly our education system is performing.

There is no doubt that this is something that needs to be put to rights. Education is the key to growing the skills required in a cut-throat competitive world – the skills to design, plan and implement the changes we need to go forward as a great nation.

Education is about the aspirations and opportunities that young people have. What do they want to make of their lives? Can they think creatively and innovatively about their future in a rapidly changing world? Can they be the best; do they desire to achieve excellence in everything they do?

Education is also about how we live together. What do we know about our fellow South Africans, about their cultures, their needs and aspirations? Do we understand the constitutional imperatives that bind us together? Are our children to be citizens of the world, building peace and solidarity wherever they go? Education is about our common humanity as South Africans in a global world. This is no small thing in a world and a continent beset by recession, endless wars and hatred.

Education helps us, together, to solve the pressing problems of the day, from economic to political and social crises, from global warming to ecological disaster and war.

Education means that as workers at the tip of Africa, where the cradle of civilisation began, we can nonetheless aspire to participate as space scientists contributing to the knowledge of the world or as biotechnologists on the cutting edge of research, inventing new vaccines to combat illness and disease.

It is a tall order that we demand all these things from education. Education has to change society. Like some holy spirit, its influence must reach everywhere to initiate people into the good things that society can offer; education must help us to participate and improve in every field of human and social endeavour.

As if to underline this, UNESCO, in a call around the Education For All Campaign (EFA), had this to say as it, too, planted a bold flag for the benefits of education:

There is good evidence that the benefits of education to individuals and society are enhanced when its quality is high. For example, better learning outcomes – as represented by pupils’ achievement test scores – are closely related to higher earnings in the labour market; thus, differences in quality are likely to indicate differences in individual worker productivity. Furthermore, the wage impact of education quality appears to be stronger for workers in developing countries than for those in more industrialised societies. Empirical research has also demonstrated that good schooling improves national economic potential – the quality of the labour force, again as measured by test scores, appears to be an important determinant of economic growth, and thus of the ability of governments to alleviate poverty.

Benefits do not arise only from the cognitive development that education brings. It is clear that honesty, reliability, determination, leadership ability and willingness to work within the hierarchies of modern life are all characteristics that society rewards. These skills are, in part, formed and nourished by schools. Similarly, evidence shows that bright but undisciplined male school dropouts who lack persistence and reliability earn less than others with the same levels of ability and cognitive achievement, and will continue to do so beyond school. Schools that encourage the above characteristics more successfully than others will bring greater long-term earnings benefits to the individuals who attend them.

Schools also try to encourage creativity, originality and intolerance of injustice – non-cognitive skills that can help people challenge and transform society’s hierarchies rather than accept them. These, too, are important results of good schooling, having broader benefits for society, irrespective of their impact on personal earnings.

Good quality in education also affects other aspects of individual behaviour in ways that bring strong social benefits. It is well known, for example, that the acquisition of literacy and numeracy, especially by women, has an impact upon fertility behaviour. More recently it has become clear that the cognitive skills required to make informed choices about HIV/AIDS risk and behaviour are strongly related to levels of education and literacy. For example, HIV/AIDS incidence in Uganda has fallen substantially in recent years for those with some primary or secondary education, whereas infection rates have remained unchanged for those with no schooling … ¹

Education is immensely complex. It has to be, considering all the demands put on a good education.

Look at this in reverse. If education is to affect every aspect of social life, there must surely be an immense number of things in society to which education relates. These in turn will impact on education. Imagine the range of influences and issues that affect the outcomes from the education system, from physical infrastructure and governance to learning time and class size, from learner aptitude to literacy, numeracy and life skills, and from human resources to economic and labour market conditions in the community. UNESCO has identified all these and more.² In Chapter 4 I intend to boil down all the areas of influence to three key ones. For the moment, it is enough to acknowledge how complicated it is to get everything right and everything coordinated at the same time.

This book invites South Africans to celebrate the possibilities of a good education. The desire for schools