A systemic crisis of dangerous proportions

Jonathan Jansen

Your view on the 2008 matriculation examination results depends on where you stand. If you are a successful student with a “B” designation, you are ecstatic because you are virtually guaranteed university entrance. Your parents are very happy and there are no protests again the school system.

If you are a student who did “not achieve” the new national senior certificate then you are devastated because the chances of higher education and a good job are, effectively, out of reach. Your parents are devastated as well but believe that the failure lies within—you did not work hard enough—and not with the school system.

If you find yourself on the sliding scale between “achieved” and “not achieved” in the complex scheme to avoid telling the students the truth—you passed or failed—then it all depends on your expectations.

If on the other hand you are a university registrar watching the escalation in the numbers of students who passed well enough for university admission (22,462 more than in 2007, enough to fill a medium-sized university), you become anxious for several reasons. First, you are concerned because in the serious universities there are limited places for admission in general, and especially since the undergraduate numbers were “capped” by the department of education. Second, you are anxious because you know from bitter experience that the massive increases in passes in subjects like mathematics bears no correlation to the capacity of students to achieve in fields like science, engineering and accounting. In other words, many students will fail despite academic support and your historically white university will face the predictable cycle of recriminations from students and officials alike that you “disadvantage” black students.

If you are a politician responsible for education in the country and the provinces you see wonderful progress and “significant achievements” (as several politicos put it) that show, without doubt, that the new curriculum works (it has to work ahead of an election year) and that the South African school system is on the way to achieving quality education for all. In this perspective only 60,322 students did “not achieve” according to government statistics and all the rest either did achieve or qualify (that’s the official word) for further examinations.

If you are such a politician in, say, the Western Cape, you wipe out a history of relative privilege and proudly proclaim (with ample assistance from the media) that you are “baas” among the provinces in the anachronistic words of Die Burger, or “top again” in the phrasing of the Cape Argus. The fact that there is no black school in the top 20 institutions or no African student in the top 20 matriculants does not matter, for here there are no township schools only Bloemhof’s and Westerford’s and Bishops.

If on the other hand you are an independent critic, you see only disaster. After all, 200,000 students failed, that’s the word. Yes, 139,000 might qualify for supplementary examinations but the truth is, when more than a third of all sitting candidates fail this suggests a systemic crisis of dangerous proportions that cannot be explained away by under-qualified teachers or lazy students or the lack of resources.

The more radical of independent critics then point to interprovincial inequalities and the fact that in the poorer and larger provinces barely half the students pass, with only a small fraction qualifying for university. For this critic the results mirror the new economics: middle class white and black students in fancy schools predictably perform better than rural and urban poor students. Nothing has changed, except for the complexion of the upper classes.

Delving beneath the language games the independent critic is part-amused, part-frightened by the lengths the department goes to in order to avoid truth telling. There are no less than seven ways of achieving in the new system—-outstanding, meritorious, substantial, adequate, moderate, or elementary—and even when the student achieves less than 30%, she has not failed but only “not achieved.” No other country in the world enters into such an elaborate scheme of mutual self-deception with its citizens, and here lies the major problem—the incapacity of the political system to own up to the simple fact of systemic breakdown that calls for much, much more than educational boot camps for failing students and professional censure for underperforming teachers.

If on the other hand you are an official expert you are incensed by these comments. You point out, rightly, that formal measures to create a more uniform system of education contributes to one standard of education. Such measures include dissolving the higher grade/standard grade distinction and the expert exam moderation and standards verification processes under the able leadership of Umalusi. And the fact that every student now does mathematics of one kind or another, raises the standards bar in a competitive, global economy where numeracy is fundamental to the wealth of nations.

The independent critic is unmoved and points to a range of counter-measures that indicate the unmistakable lowering of standards. Where else in the world can a student pass by failing one subject and where only 30% is required in three subjects and 40% in another three subjects? What lies behind the upward adjustment of raw marks in several subjects? How can claims be made of an efficient examination system when more than 56,000 students did not receive their results? Does the creation of a subject called mathematical literacy not re-institute a standard grade equivalent examination?

The independent critic is even more suspicious when examining the fine print of the results. How is it possible that 79% of students pass mathematical literacy in a country with the one of the worst numeracy results in the world? Every international test that benchmarked South African learners against their counterparts in other parts of the world (such as international mathematics and science studies) or the regional SACMEQ (Southern African Consortium for the Monitoring of Educational Quality) studies caused political consternation by pointing to broken foundations for numeracy in the pre- and early- high school years. Even homegrown research such as the so-called Systemic Evaluation confirmed the pattern of underachievement across the primary grades in numeracy. Now, suddenly, when every student does either mathematics of mathematical literacy, there are massive increases in performance across the board. It does not require profound knowledge of statistics to realize there is something rotten behind this spike in mathematics achievement.

The officials in the department of education hit back. Why are we surprised? Never before has so much preparation gone into this high stakes examination. More and more teachers were trained at huge costs to prepare them for the new curriculum and the new system of assessment. Every matric learner had multiple opportunities to write preparatory examinations, including something called “model” or “exemplar” examination papers so that they could become acquainted with the standard of assessment. Target schools were specially resourced for improved achievements especially in the so-called gateway subjects (science and mathematics).

The results therefore reflect the effort of hardworking government officials at all levels. For the politician and the bureaucrat the stakes are high: if the ideological project of the ANC-led government, outcomes based education, is seen to fail, then the credibility of the entire transformation project is at risk.

Even though, according to the critic, there is no simple or clear line to be drawn between the curriculum and the matriculation results, for the politician and bureaucrat (often the same persona), the link has to exist.

Wait a minute says the independent critic. You actually give students mock examination papers indicating what they can expect a few weeks later? On this matter, is it not true that in many cases the actual questions, with very minor changes, showed up in both examinations? And why is the mathematical literacy results to completely out of synch with most other subjects, especially since the public was told repeatedly that this was not a standard grade paper but in fact a tough assessment of knowledge of numbers?

If you are an employer from the tough world of business you are not at all impressed with these results. At the lower end of the market you will again be flooded by demand from young people for low-skill jobs in fast food joints, many of them carrying meaningless school-leaving certificates. At the upper end of the market your concern is with the graduates from university who still do not bring with them the associated skills that make for good workers—confidence, creativity, commitment, independence, hard skills, teamwork, positive attitudes, and a knack for problem-solving and taking initiative. You have learnt over the years that the certificates students carry tell you little about talent and potential.

If it is the case that the scale of failure points to systemic breakdown in the entire education system and not individual or institutional pathology, what does this mean for transformation? It means conceding that patterns of achievement after apartheid mirror perfectly patterns of achievement under apartheid. This is a hard pill to swallow. It means conceding that educational change will not result from band-aiding the symptomatic expressions of the crisis. The entire education system needs to be placed under review.