The Year 2000 – SC Disaster: Once Again
The scorecard in the 2000 Senior Certificate examinations has once again unmistakably, shown the tragic disaster that befell more than a quarter of a million high school students/learners at the end of their final year at school. They failed to obtain even the very low minimum standard required to earn a school-leaving Senior Certificate. They suffered this disaster after at least twelve years of labouring through a school system with its known weaknesses, its known continuous struggle against terrible social conditions. These conditions make effective education impossible in the vast majority of schools spread amongst ghettos, locations, “squatter camps” and farms all over the country.
And they have persisted for many decades. It is both tragic and ironic that the Minister of Education and others, have displayed a strange kind of euphoria in claiming a 9% improvement over the 49.6% pass rate in 1999. The same minister has continued the process of sacking (retrenching) 40000 teachers to freeze the expenditure on education – regardless of the consequent loss of skills, experience and dedication to the school system in general.
As the new school terms began in 2001 it was announced that 1000 teachers in the Western Cape and 2000 teachers in the Northern Province would be declared “in excess” and could be removed from the teacher/educator corps!
Not to be deterred the Minister of Education declared on 28 December 2000 in his report on the SC results that it was his ministry’s aim to reduce the failure rate in 2001 to about 20%. Only 1 province, the Western Cape, achieved a pass rate of 80%. It was within two weeks of this lottery forecast that the Minister and his Western Cape Education Director announced the cut of a thousand in the number of teachers in this province. In June 2000 the Minister had declared that redeployment had been stopped.
The hard, stubborn fact is that the Minister and the rest of the Cabinet, together with the provincial education members of the Executives and their Directors, work within a policy framework that the whole Cabinet approves. That framework is part of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy. The Education budget, nationally and in the provinces, is set by the Cabinet under the known directives of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The slashing of the numbers of SA’s educators by more that 40000 is part of the GEAR policy. The denial to most schools of enough funds to provide textbooks, basic equipment, maintenance and other essential amenities is a direct immediate result of such policies.
The system of imposing school fees upon parents is a system of extortion of an education tax to make up for the disastrous GEAR-directed policy of financing education. It has changed education into a commodity which only the better-off parents can afford. And it is only those schools which can impose high school fees that can pay for the services of the extra teachers that they need to make a success of their education programmes. Among the poor, the oppressed and exploited who cannot afford education taxes, the children have to suffer the problems of a crumbling education system.
The “improved” results of 2000 may have raised hopes among the ignorantly optimistic. But amongst critical students of the South African education system lots of eyebrows have been raised. Already the University of Pretoria’s Education faculty under Professor Jonathan Jansen has started a serious study of results in the Northern Province, where the pass rate leapt from 37.5% in 1999 to 51.4% in 2000. This in a province where the chaos in both the education administration and the teaching corps had reached frightening levels.
In a humourless attack upon Professor Jansen’s plan, Kader Asmal said that his ministry and that of the Northern Province would not make any information or other help available to the Jansen team. On the other hand the SA Certification Council (Safcert), which verifies all provincial results, welcomed the probe into the procedures used to verify the results. But it, too, would not provide any statistical data. Even the official reports show that the marks were adjusted by as much as 25% by continuous assessment and similar mechanisms. These official stances show to what extent the education bureaucracy prefers to close its eyes to the realities around the Senior Certificate results. But the results themselves provide in more ways than one an eloquent array of truths that cannot be hidden or denied.
Some 340000 candidates of the 488000 who wrote the examination passed. The number who attained what is still described as a matriculation exemption pass made up less than one-seventh of the number who passed. This means that 86 out of every 100 students failed to gain an aggregate mark of 45% with enough subject passes on the Higher Grade. These students were awarded a school-leaving Senior Certificate. If, indeed, there was a 9% in the overall pass-rate, it was in this dangerously low level of achievement that the increase occurred.
In this respect for the year 2000 the Minister revealed that 65465 fewer candidates wrote the Higher Grade Matric exemption cluster of exams; that is, 56300 fewer than the 1999 student examinations; and that some 4900 more students had attained matric exemption in 2000.
A large number of candidates simply did not write the examinations. In the Eastern Cape alone 6100 of the full-time students did not enter the examinations, of the 74563 who did write 5301 gained a “matric” pass, 31817 were awarded a school-leaving Senior Certificate and 37000 failed. It is statistics such as these that underline the natures of the continuing disaster that faces the schools every year. The exceptions of this savage rule are few in number and are to be found chiefly amongst the ex-Model C schools. These, with vastly better financial, material and human resources and freed from the burden of rotten social conditions are able to achieve what they do in fact achieve.
Despite the fact that the ministry was shy about giving detailed statistics for key - gateway-subjects like First Language (Higher Grade) or Mathematics (Higher Grade) or Physical Science (Higher Grade), it is a fact that fewer than 10% of the Maths Higher Grade candidates passed. This stark reality reaches out further into the future, showing that with some miraculous change there will never in the short or medium term be enough Mathematics teachers to make a difference.
A closer examination of the schools’ results in the provinces shows quite clearly that except for a small minority of schools in the ghettos and on the “frayed edges” of society, it is still the seriously “disadvantaged” that were left with the school-leaving certificate. Officialdom’s “previously disadvantaged” continue to be extensively and more seriously disadvantaged at the most critical junctures in their lives.
If some schools did maintain good pass rates, this was most certainly not due to the efforts of the government for whom the minister speaks, or to the efforts of his almost numberless crew of administrative assistants. Within the past five years the “right-sizing” and “down-sizing” (read “sacking”) of teaching staffs have stripped the schools of indispensable teachers at all levels. The greatly reduced staff numbers have stuck to their tasks and by their success negated the vandalism that the ruling class has been engaged in the schools of the oppressed and exploited. These teachers deserve all the credit due to them. This government, like its predecessor, has also as has been mentioned imposed upon parents education taxes in the form of increased school fees; “user costs” by driving parents to pay for text books, stationery and school-running and maintenance costs. Such taxes rest heavily on the poorest. And such practices have seriously dislocated the essential functions of schools. Parents who are fairly-big to big earners pay school fees (forced education taxes) of several thousand rands for each child. These children escape the vandalism that dominates ghetto schools. They do their learning in schools which, on top of any government subsidy, rake in several millions of rands in school fees with which they can employ extra teachers paid by the School Governing Bodies. In this way class sizes are kept to the lowest and best levels. These schools have all the required physical resources and equipment. In addition, they are situated in developed suburbs that provide positive environments for the children’s development and education.
Teachers’ efforts are maximised. In such schools the pass rates are seldom below 80%. The matriculation-level pass rates are high and the subject choices slot in with the choices of careers to which the pupils have access.
On the other hand the most deplorable comment made by the voluble Education Minister in explaining the improved results in schools that under-performed in 1999 must be his statement that improvement was due to the pupils’/learners’ choice to write Standard Grade examinations. It is a notorious fact that there has been continuous pressure on pupils in the schools of the oppressed to study at the Standard Grade level the easy subject options. Debasement of education standards of this sort equals improvement in the minds of the present rulers. Serious educators see the practice and the outcomes as an unmitigated disaster.
The school-leaving (non-matriculation) certificate shuts out every entry into all major tertiary institutions. Universities, Technikons and Teacher-Training colleges in particular have to share out among them the small group of matriculants who satisfy their entrance requirements. Raw experience over more than four decades has shown that even the “matric” pass is no guarantee of success in such institutions. The fact is that all the special “ethnic” universities created by Verwoerd, mainly in the non-urban bundu, have collapsed under a burden of poor pass rates, tens of millions of rands of unpaid fees and now having to face down-sizing both of student numbers and university staffs, who are being swept up in the tide of retrenchments and being “in excess”.
The SC results must be re-examined by Minister Asmal and all his directors, advisors, consultants and rock-face operators. We cannot provide advice in critical academic terms, and if we could and did the Minister would appoint an overloaded commission to explain the advice to him and even examine its import for the future. We must get down to the language of the market place.
We do not believe that a successful education system can arise upon the “race”-ridden class divisions and crumbling urban and rural habitats of homo sapiens in the country. No-one - least of all an obedient servant of the World Bank and the international Monetary Fund like Minister Asmal whose task it is to carry out the instructions and the policies of his masters – could prevent the annual disasters in Grade 1 to Grade 12 in schools where there are no defenses against these disasters, in the ghettoes particularly. We have to be content at this stage to say to Asmal and Company (Limited) including the Cabinet, Get real! Idasa (the Institute for Democracy in South Africa) has by research shown that 80% of South African teachers are un- or under-qualified. The National Center for Education Statistics has shown that during the period from 1996 to 1999 Grade 8 pupils in South Africa were poorest of 38 countries whose achievements in Mathematics and Science were assessed. The Human Sciences Research Institute has in a research project shown that the vast majority of Outcomes-Based Education – trained boys and girls in Grades 1 to 3 do not possess the appropriate skills in reading, writing and number work for their ages. And what of the call for mother-tongue instruction as a panacea for all the ills that beset our education system? Mother-tongue instruction has been in operation compulsorily, for more than forty years. It has not produced any miracles. So the Minister et al need to get real, and to know what it is that they claim to “celebrate”. Farmyard hens do not cackle when they know by instinct what eggs among their clutch are rotten.
We deplore the annual slaughter in the ranks of hundreds of millions of boys and girls who desperately need to conclude their school careers with real success. To Asmal and his cohorts we say: Look again at the results in each province. Find out which schools did well and why! And look to the future. What were the roots of the problems. Do you or your governing corps have any solutions? If you have, get real and cut out the waffling that passes for considered judgement and caused even the president of the country to declare that he was “very encouraged” by what can only be regarded as the tragic saga of results 2000.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL, PUBLISHED BY NUPSAW EDUCATION SECTOR, NOVEMBER - JANUARY-MARCH 2001]
EDITOR: Mrs. HN Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001