Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
absent. According to the report, teachers at a third of the schools monitored were using all the sick leave available to them, while also spending a number of days at union meetings, funerals, or training courses. In addition, though teachers at two-thirds of the schools were in class for 90% of the time, many of them were unable to use this time effectively as they lacked subject knowledge.30
Despite the urgent need to overcome these problems, Sadtu – which represents some two-thirds of the country’s 390 000 teachers and is an important ANC ally – has long resisted the government’s attempts to reinstate the teacher inspections system that applied under National Party rule. In 2002 Sadtu physically threatened and removed performance evaluators from schools, once again stalling the reintroduction of an external assessment system. Yet such a system is badly needed, especially as teachers tend to give themselves high marks on the self-appraisal system that currently applies, even though their actual performance is often very different.31
In the 2009/10 budget, the then minister of finance, Trevor Manuel, set aside R31 million to improve the quality of teaching and called for the urgent establishment of an evaluation unit to monitor teaching and outcomes at schools. But Sadtu again opposed this unit, saying it sounded too much like the old inspectorate of the apartheid years. Thulas Nxesi, Sadtu general secretary, said the union would oppose any moves to ‘punish’ struggling teachers when provincial administrations had not done enough to develop their teaching skills.32
In 2011 the Department of Basic Education again tried to introduce an independent ‘teacher performance appraisal’ but Sadtu once more rejected the proposal, saying it needed ‘further discussion’. Given the ANC’s reluctance to confront Sadtu, this effectively sounded the death knell for the idea – and no such system to help assess and improve teacher performance has yet been introduced.33
In October 2013 research by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), a non-governmental organisation, recommended that teacher competency tests should be introduced – not to penalise teachers for poor performance – but simply to identify which teachers were in need of further training. But Sadtu again rejected the idea, saying such tests were ‘not an option’. Added the union’s general secretary, Mugwena Maluleke: ‘We are opposed to teacher competency tests, we don’t want them. We prefer teachers to be trained to improve their competency.’34
Sadtu has even rejected attempts by Motshekga to introduce competency tests for the teachers responsible for marking matriculation examination scripts. In addition, it has vetoed performance contracts for principals and their deputies, and successfully resisted a call by the National Planning Commission for teachers’ pay to be linked to their performance. Many teachers do not even allow school principals to visit their classrooms to evaluate their performance, a practice described by Needu’s Nic Taylor in October 2013 as both ‘rife’ and ‘disastrous’.35
Poor quality of schooling
Since 1994, factors such as these have witnessed millions of black pupils, in particular, progressing through largely dysfunctional schools without ever properly learning to read, write, or do arithmetic. Yet such skills are the foundation for all subsequent learning, and also for success in the workplace.
In April 2014 the statistician-general, Pali Lehohla, was unusually frank in blaming high unemployment among Africans on ‘the poor quality of public education’ in South Africa. Lehohla said there was only one reason why unemployment levels were still highest among Africans 20 years into democracy – poor education. ‘The numbers tell the story. The grey matter needs to be fed to reap change. Education is the only way to feed grey matter. And grey matter is what makes successful countries.’36
International assessments also highlight the poor quality of education in South Africa. In its global competitiveness index for 2013/14, the World Economic Forum ranked the quality of South Africa’s primary education system at 133rd out of 148 countries. It ranked South Africa’s secondary education system at 146th, or second worst in the world. This put South Africa’s performance behind those of impoverished neighbouring states such as Lesotho and Swaziland. The World Economic Forum has also ranked South Africa last of all (at 148th out of 148 countries) for how its pupils perform on mathematics and science.37
So bad has schooling become that the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), Zwelinzima Vavi, has said: ‘South Africa’s education system is a catastrophe and the children of working class parents are being condemned to a deep black hole with minimal chances of escape.’38
In July 2012 Mamphela Ramphele, then a civil society activist and later the founder of AgangSA, blamed ‘the monumental failure’ in schooling on the ANC government, saying: ‘Children under apartheid’s “gutter” education were better educated than today’s, [as then] at least the kids could write and read.’ Soon afterwards the minister of higher education and training, Blade Nzimande (who has since been reappointed to this post) admitted that the government had failed to improve the quality of schooling. ‘In spite of continually increasing levels of spending on foundation phase education, the results of learners in grades 3 to 6 remain some of the worst in the world. A majority of pupils entering the intermediate phase remain largely illiterate and experience difficulty as they progress through the system.’39
Matric pass rate a misleading indicator
A rising matric pass rate has helped obscure these failures, allowing the government to claim successes where few have been achieved. At first glance, the schooling system seems to be functioning effectively, for the proportion of pupils writing and passing the National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations (the new matric exam introduced in 2008) has risen steadily from 61% in 2009 to 78% in 2013. Motshekga has trumpeted this 17 percentage-point increase as proof of solid gains in schooling. But many commentators caution that the National Senior Certificate has helped cloak poor standards of schooling by making the curriculum less demanding and reducing the requirements for a pass. To pass the NSC exams, pupils now need achieve only 40% in three subjects (one of which must be a home language) and 30% in a further three subjects. This means that pupils can ‘pass’ with an average of 35%.40
The government’s praise for the 78% pass rate in 2013 is also misleading, for it leaves out of account the high number of pupils who drop out of school in grades 10 or 11 and so never sit their final examinations at all. In 2011, for instance, there were 1 055 790 pupils enrolled in Grade 10, but so many dropped out thereafter that only some 562 100 full-time pupils (roughly 53% of the Grade 10 total) wrote their NSC exams at the end of Grade 12. Of those who wrote, 439 780 (roughly 42% of the Grade 10 total) managed to pass. Hence, from the Grade 10 class of 2011 alone, the schooling system ejected more than 516 000 youngsters without equipping them with a high-school leaving certificate.41
Under the National Senior Certificate system, the bar has also been set very low for pupils wishing to enter university. Such pupils must attain at least 30% in the language of instruction at their intended university and 50% in four or more subjects. In 2008, the first year in which pupils wrote the NSC exam, some 22 000 more candidates than usual attained what the government now calls a ‘bachelor’s pass’, entitling them to proceed to a degree course at a university. Most universities thus had unexpectedly high student intakes in February 2009. In virtually every year since then, the number of bachelor’s passes has increased, putting universities under great pressure to accommodate the rising number of young people ostensibly equipped to study for degrees.42
However, because the quality of public schooling has remained so poor, many of those with bachelor’s passes under the NSC have little prospect of succeeding at university. This was confirmed in 2009, when Higher Education South Africa, an organisation representing vice-chancellors at public universities, implemented a ‘national benchmarks test’ to assess the skills of some 13 000 first-year university students who had written the NSC in 2008. This test revealed that:
■ fewer than half the students were ‘proficient’ in academic literacy skills;
■ only a quarter had adequate quantitative literacy skills (such as understanding percentages and interpreting tables); and
■ only 7% were proficient in mathematics.43
These