JONATHAN JANSEN | Elite schools hoard the ‘cream of the crop’ — leave something for the rest of us

Why are some schools able to choose ‘the best’ students and get away with it? By best I mean students with good academic results, evidence of leadership in their previous school, solid attendance records and reports of good behaviour. By contrast, schools in poor and working class areas are forced to take applicants who show up on the provincial department’s application sites. The latter group of schools is caught in a bind — they are pressurised to take in students who are shown away at the better-off schools or who show up at the last minute desperately seeking a place in any school.

The poorer schools have no power to select their students for two reasons. One, the overflowing pool of applicants is generally weak. By weak I mean poor academic results, records of bad behaviour, evidence of earlier failure (like being 17 in grade 8) and so on. Two, the number of teachers you can appoint depends on having ‘enough’ learners registered; in other words, jobs are on the line if you start to act like the elite schools.

The elite public (let alone private) schools have long gamed the system. They are flooded with applicants from traditional feeder schools who are also, in class terms, elite. Such schools need not worry about poor and working class kids, regardless of results, because they can fill the top spots with privileged children whose parents can pay. Nor do they have to worry about large classes if they take in more students because these schools have the ultimate class leverage — they can hire extra teachers and carry over the financial burden to elite parents by increasing school fees.

Why risk middle class flight from the public school system especially when your own children, as government officials and politicians, attend the fancier schools?

Got it? That’s how in education the rich get richer and the poor remained trapped in their class misery.

Any government seriously committed to equity in education would of course have changed this scenario so that all schools share in carrying the burden of ‘weaker’ academic students with less money to purchase themselves out of trouble. But why risk middle class flight from the public school system especially when your own children, as government officials and politicians, attend the fancier schools?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why South Africa is cursed to retain a two-track system of education ... one for the white and black middle class elites (let’s call it the A track) and one for the children of the poor and working classes (the B track).

Using the Cape as an example, the A track children will go to UCT and Stellenbosch University, while most of the B track children will go nowhere at all. To be sure, there are individuals on the B track who, because of sheer talent and resilience, will go to university (mostly UWC and CPUT), but their numbers are small.

Then of course there are children from the working classes who will get a rugby scholarship that enable them to access an elite school, but those numbers are even smaller. Otherwise, the trick is to do so well in your working class primary school that you are able to access the small number of scholarships on offer at one of the former white schools. Again, the numbers of migrating students in such cases are negligible.

We talk a lot about race, but we are squeamish talking about class. We, the elites, try to imagine it does not exist, in part because we benefit from the class arrangements in South African society, and in part because it is very difficult to resolve.

Here’s another fascinating feature of working class schools in the same geographic area. They begin to discriminate among themselves through selection. Some attract the solid academic working class students, and others the most troubled and academically weak students.

I am enough of a realist to realise that the capitalist system (you can pay your way out of trouble) is not going to collapse any time soon. What can be done within the constraints of a class-based school system? One, give working class schools the chance to apply a measure of selection in their intake (grades 1 and 8) so that all schools in a particular area share the spread of strong/weak students available on application. Two, appeal to the elite schools to share their privilege whether it is through shared laboratories or teacher resources or contributions of instructional technologies such as data projectors. Three, pour resources into building and maintaining promising township schools — such as the amazing Manzomthombo High School in Emfuleni — and make sure that working class schools as a whole produce top learners despite their circumstances.

Such actions are within our reach.