JONATHAN JANSEN | System is ‘stabilising’, yet other numbers tell a different story — who’s lying?

Which 80% do you choose to believe is the better indicator of the health of the South African school system: the one the minister of basic education announced last week, that 82.9% of our children passed the National Senior Certificate (NSC) examination, or the international benchmark study of 2021 that showed 81% of grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language (worse, in fact than the 78% score of 2016)? Both cannot be true.

When I posed this question on social media some responders offered the case of Schrodinger’s cat, that both can be true at the same time. Not so. Schrodinger was not making an argument about a system for which we have observable data over 12 years of schooling.

In fact, the minister of basic education in the usual pre-release announcement warmed us to the idea that the results would show that the system is stabilising; it’s a lie.

The system is in tatters, even if a particular cohort of learners (691,160 who actually sat for the exams) did better every year since 2009 when 60% passed — a number that is itself suspect given negative Covid-19 effects that every education expert predicted would linger in scholastic results for a number of years.

Parents have been calling me every day since the announcement of results, puzzled by one simple thing: 'But my child got a bachelor’s pass!'

So what is the 81% about? It is the objective international standard of the state of education using reading as a proxy for system health.

The 82.9% pass, on the other hand, is a number that captures a much larger cohort of pupils before a few hundred thousand drop out of the system or schools hold back weaker pupils who would bring down the grade 12 averages for a school.

The DA has a point when it argues that the real matric pass rate is actually 55.3% if dropouts are made part of the calculation. Imagine this: 345,626 pupils dropped out between grades 10 (2021) and 12 (2023).

This kind of calculus does not serve the political head of education well in an election year — and so the sleight of hand here is to freeze the results for one year (2023) and tell the public, with a straight face, that “the system is stabilising”.

Never forget that those who pass are jumping over a very low bar when it comes to education standards such as those set by the Progress in International Literacy Study (Pirls) that shocked us with the fact that only 19% of our children could read for meaning.

In the aftermath of the minister’s announcement, I have had to deal with the fallout of this mass deception in the grade 12 results. Parents have been calling me every day since the announcement of results, puzzled by one simple thing: “But my child got a bachelor’s pass! Why did all the universities she applied to turn her down?”

I then have to give the parent the bad news: “True, ma’am, she has a bachelor’s, but she also failed mathematics and physical science. Most degrees in South African universities have a minimum maths requirement.” These students are confused and are devastated, but the minister and her acolytes are clinking the champagne glasses for they really do not care about those lost to the system or those given false hope.

What is fascinating about the responses of universities to these inflated results is something called system correction: when the school system produces poor-quality (if high-quantity) results, the universities self-correct by cancelling out students with weak results regardless of whether they met the requirements for university entrance.

We should be grateful for self-correction, or the entire South African education system would fall flat on its face.

Put differently, South Africa has some of the leading universities in the world, and for those at the top to remain competitive, they have to repudiate the low standards of the school system or lose their edge. It’s as simple and revealing as that.

That explains why a sizeable chunk of the record 40.9% of NSC students with a bachelor’s pass will never see the inside of a university. They did not pass well enough, and the universities were on their guard.

There is only one way to salvage this situation. We need to strengthen the foundations of the school system such that the material resources, make-up energy (for example, after-school camps) and the political attention shifts from grade 12 to the first years of schooling and even earlier in preschool education. Then we would have more students coming through into the higher grades with stronger competences in languages and the sciences.

In that way we would recover a sense of not only individual achievement but also social justice in education, the latter having long dropped off the agenda of current government.