No hope for teachers

So, yet another report tells the sad story that many of our primary school teachers cannot do simple fractions. We know this, of course, from so many other research reports over the years, such as the recent national assessments on numeracy and countless international studies of achievement in mathematics among South African pupils.

We know this, and I asked myself the other day: What purpose does it serve to say the obvious over and over again? Will teachers get smarter if we test them again and again? Will pupils get a better deal in maths classrooms if we expose the fraud that passes as education for poor children? Of course not.

So why do we keep doing this? I suspect it is out of frustration with the incapacity of our government to come up with game-breaking solutions to the crisis. We hope that some provincial head of education will be struck by the serious lack of subject matter knowledge in mathematics and come up with a smart bomb equivalent for effective teaching of the subject. We pray that our minister of basic education will appear between the fanfare of announcing matric results and put a credible national plan on the table that changes maths learning.

But none of this is going to happen, in part because I suspect that, if you gave those simple fractions tests to all the officials in the national and provincial departments of education, you might get the same startling results. Try me on this one.

There are two serious reasons why our government will not react to this latest data on teacher achievement, or more accurately, underachievement, in primary mathematics. First, it does not care enough. There is simply not enough concern for the poorest among us. After all, who cares when one's own children are in fancy schools where teachers can, in fact, do fractions?

I see a lot of political grandstanding and official pretence, but I have not seen in any province the kind of educational leadership that rolls up its sleeves and immerses senior politicians and their key strategists in the poorest schools to change the mathematical life chances of pupils. You are more likely to find these politicians and senior officials at branch meetings of their parties plotting their political survival than in the trenches making sure teachers receive the training and support they need to overcome knowledge deficits in mathematics.

What really gets my goat is how the same politicians who fail to act on the crisis in foundational learning then criticise universities for entry standards that, in their calculation, "keep out poor black students" because of low marks in subjects like mathematics.

In other words, universities are supposed to participate in this fraud called education by extending the mediocrity into higher learning. Sadly, there are university leaders who do this without conscience. thereby ensuring that black youth receive a microwaved version of Bantu education all over again. Verwoerd must be smiling in his grave.

Of course universities have a responsibility to provide bridges to higher learning for young people failed by the school system; our apartheid history - if not also our post-apartheid incompetence - demands such responsibility.

At my own institution, the University of the Free State, we provide three different ways into university for those who do poorly in school maths and other subjects; as a result, we have produced thousands of teachers, doctors, chemists and other specialists.

But you do notask universities to lower the required standard for admission into the mainstream of higher education; that kind of mindlessness would serve the short-term political ambitions of a few, but it would put the final nail in the coffin of higher education in this country. In other words, complete systemic collapse.

But there is a second reason our political heads and their so-called technical departments of education (so-called because our bureaucrats are too often political deployees bereft of the educational knowledge required to change schools) will not respond to teacher underachievement - they simply do not know enough themselves. One of the most incompetent decisions of the politicians was to give teachers pre-planned materials for teaching, official confirmation that teachers knew too little to be trusted.

Instead of effective intervention on teacher knowledge, we band-aided the problem.

So what do we do in a country in which the people responsible for systemic change in schools do not care enough and do not know enough?