JONATHAN JANSEN | Why pick on the IEB, Lesufi? Is it embarrassment?

You are going to hear a lot of nonsense as we enter the final straight for the 2024 election. The president said at his party’s January 8 event that “we are now enforcing strict immigration laws”. Seriously? What were you doing Mr President during the past 30 years? Why now? It’s simple. This is a party without ethics or principle to guide its policy positions. The stench of populist politics fills the air.

The sharks sense blood in the water around immigration issues so that the more outrageous you can be about foreign nationals, the more you tap into the xenophobic sentiment that runs deep in South African society. What a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the state to deliver on its promises to its own citizens. Deflect, and blame the foreigner among you. How pathetic.

On the education front, there is another piece of quackery making the airwaves. The premier of Gauteng and former MEC for education in the same province has called for a single matric final exam. Seriously? Why now? Stinking populism without any foundation in educational reality. Let me explain.

The country has at least two examination authorities at the moment: the National Senior Certificate (NSC) of the government and the private Independent Examination Board (IEB). The segregated examination reminds Lesufi of apartheid, where the privileged and the poor are given different opportunities even if they entered the same university. I laughed hard when I read this nonsense.

First of all, examinations are not your problem because they come at the end of 12 years of schooling. The quality lies not so much in these terminal examinations but in the entire school experience that brought them there. So here’s the question, premier: why do you allow the segregation of 12 years of vastly different learning experiences for children in elite private and public schools compared to the majority who are stuck in dysfunctional rural and township schools? Why do children in one set of schools drown in pit latrine toilets while others install Olympic-size aquatic centres? You know which schools your children attend.

So please, sir, stop your tomfoolery: the exam is not the problem but your failure to equalise opportunities to learn long before the grade 12 exams is. In our book, Who gets in and why (UCT Press), we offer extensive empirical evidence and theoretical argument to demonstrate how and why these two school systems operate under your noses and with your consent.

So why pick on the IEB? Simple actually. The IEB has become an embarrassment to your government. Their students do much better than those in the public school examination. They get more distinction passes and more of them qualify for university entry. The quality of the examination is much better and the standards of assessment much more stringent and are not subject to the kinds of political pressures from the government to up the marks “in the interests of the black child”. If only it was about the black child rather than the political interests of scurrilous politicians.

There is also greater integrity in the IEB’s examination process compared to the regular reports of cheating and leakages in the public examination. It is a more efficient system that gives students their results much earlier — like the public examination system used to do, by the way.

Do not let the premier fool you into thinking only elites write the IEB examination. Not true, many poorer students and less established schools also opt for an alternative to the less credible public school examination.

There are other dangers the premier is flirting with. In a democratic country, it is often the case that there is more than one examination authority for schools. This is good because it gives parents choices and because it keeps the public system on its toes. By the way, one of the reasons we have the poorest-performing national science, mathematics and literacy results on the continent is because countries such as Zimbabwe retained the Cambridge O and A level examinations because that authority sets a very high standard that the school system has to adjust to. Calls for the “localisation” or “indigenisation” of examinations were always there, but parents knew this was a ruse that carried great danger: the collapse of quality education in that country.

A politician from another party was right when she once observed that the government in charge of our country cannot fix what is broken and so it sets out to break what works. Let me warn you: a single examination is not about equity in education, just like the National Health Insurance initiative has little to do with quality healthcare; it is about creating a concentration of resources (like NSFAS and so on) that can be stripped by the corrupt in officialdom now that the taps are running dry in other parts of the economy.

Do not be fooled.