Patronage kills education

The Big Read: Few countries are satisfied with the performance of their schools, and school improvement has long been a priority for politicians, civil servants and the public alike.

Many organisations exist solely to improve management, teaching and learning in schools. South Africa is no exception and billions of rands of non-government money are spent annually on this activity.

These programmes certainly have an effect. For example, it is fairly common to achieve an increase in grade 3 reading scores of about 5%. This is not bad, off a base of around 20% in many rural schools. But donors are beginning to feel despondent - even angry - that, despite the best efforts of trainers, we seem unable to break the sluggish culture that pervades large slices of the system.

In my previous article in this series I described some of the management problems characteristic of the civil service in general, including its largest component, the school system.

Today I want to turn my attention to teacher knowledge.

It is self-evident that teachers cannot teach what they don't know themselves. Therefore, knowledge of their subject should be a prerequisite for teachers to enter classrooms. Well, how do we shape up in this area?

Let's take the example of a school improvement project that worked in one of our rural provinces for seven years. A start was made in 100 primary schools in each of four districts, and a baseline was conducted to assess initial conditions.

One element of the baseline was to test teacher knowledge in literacy and maths. The maths test was constructed by selecting nine items from a test designed to assess the knowledge of grade 6 learners. The average scores, by district, for about 100 grade 3 teachers ranged from 48% to 73%. The lowest individual teacher score was 9% and the highest 93%.

After intensive training for principals and teachers, and the supply of books to schools, the evaluation was repeated. Teacher scores in two districts improved significantly, with a number of teachers achieving 100%. But in the other two districts the results were unimpressive. In all four districts many teachers were still scoring under 50%, with a lowest of 11%.

This kind of evidence has now accumulated to the point where it is clear that many teachers in the system would fail the tests for which they are supposed to be preparing their pupils. Even more distressing is the realisation that improving teacher knowledge is a very slow process.

Why is this so? Is it because of the mediocre training they had, including poor schooling? Undoubtedly this is part of the problem. And it is this factor that leads some teacher unions to insist that their members cannot be held accountable for the performance of their children until they have been trained, or "developed", to use the current parlance.

Hence the slogan: "No accountability without development."

Here too, there is no doubt that our teachers need training. But there are two kinds of problems inherent in investing all our hopes in training.

The first is that this attitude reflects a dependency culture. It implies that teachers are incapable of helping themselves, of taking a good textbook and trying to figure out, or discussing with their colleagues, the concepts and procedures of their subject.

It is clear that most teachers do nothing of the kind. When the end of day school bell rings, their time is their own. At best they may copy out some meaningless administrative task, which Minister Motsheka has finally realised, to her great credit, actually takes teachers away from knowledge and teaching.

But working with a textbook or set work would be very far from the thoughts of most teachers outside of school hours.

The second problem with putting all our eggs in the training basket is that knowledge decays. Use it or lose it. The best teachers spend many afternoon and evening hours with their books, not necessarily because they were badly educated, but because no one can remember all the details of mathematical procedures, historical arguments or poetic stories from one year to the next. So, even if it were possible to train the country's 350 000 teachers on every aspect of their respective subjects, in two or three years we would have to do it all over again, unless they kept it up. Training does have a role to play, but the long-term solution must be to engender professional attitudes among teachers, which essentially involves individuals taking personal responsibility for their own knowledge and the performance of their pupils. But the worm at the heart of the apple is that expertise cannot grow in a climate of patronage.

If we continue to appoint and promote civil servants on the basis of who they know, then what they know and how they perform quickly become subordinate.

A society that doesn't value expert knowledge is very unlikely to nurture its growth. And it is not just party hacks who are being appointed to many of the top jobs, but all the way through the system cliques seize control in the interests of their own bank balances and those of other members of their clan.

Let's be clear: post-apartheid conditions are not responsible for the absence of a professional culture in our civil service. The majority of our schools, since inception, have always been like this. To some extent this was inevitable under the conditions of very rapid growth which occurred in the last 40 years.

However, these conditions are providing an insurmountable barrier to the growth of a society driven by expertise and professional attitudes. And without these we can have little service delivery or school improvement.

• Taylor is Senior Research Fellow at JET Education Services. He writes in his personal capacity. This is the final article in a three-part series on education