Director’s Blog
December 09, 2011
What makes the difference?
Mark Potterton
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, widely regarded as South Africa’s moral conscience, frequently reminds us that South Africa is so unequal that 60% of the population earns less than 15% of the national income. The richest 10% of households commands 54% of all wages and salaries. Clearly, this is not a sustainable situation – but how do we fix it?
A crucial step is to improve the quality of education in our schools. But it doesn’t seem as if we are succeeding on a broad scale in doing that – it seems that the quality of education in our country remains poor. But, there are some examples of schools doing well – what is it that sets them apart from
the rest?
It definitely cannot be fixed by money alone – despite South Africa’s teachers being amongst the highest paid in the world (in purchasing power parity terms), teacher motivation levels are often extremely low.
Research conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (Chisholm et al, 2005) showed that South Africa’s teachers spent 16 hours a week, on average, actually engaged in teaching and learning – surely their core tasks. A 2011 study conducted by Stanford Professor Carnoy in the North West Province and Botswana showed that the situation does not seem to have improved – teachers did not teach 60% of the lessons they were scheduled to teach (Carnoy et al, 2011).
Carnoy et al come to the following conclusion: “The bottom line is that South African schools for African children are incredibly inefficient, at least in producing academic learning. We observed good teaching and teachers who assiduously met with their class regularly, but these were relative rarities. Even worse, on average, teachers and administrators accepted low performance levels of students and their own low levels of knowledge and low expectation as the norm – business as usual. This needs to change and it can change if school and higher-level personnel begin taking responsibility for drastically different teacher and administrator capacity and drastically different behaviour”.
So, what is can we do to change this? We need to distinguish what the factors are that cause some schools, in the midst of a failing education system, to continue to do well.
Mark Potterton, national director of the Catholic Institute of Education (CIE), draws attention to the success of Catholic schools in South Africa. A ministerial report by the CIE, Schools That Work (Christie, Butler and Potterton, 2007), observed that when emphasis is placed on the central tasks of schools, they can perform better. Schools where education is the central task focus on the central task. An understanding of “the real work” provides a sense of purpose and motivation that operates in self-sustaining ways. In other words, schools that have strong leadership, where the principal and staff are committed to education, produce good results.
But how do we create that leadership? The book Catholic Schools and Common Good, published in the United States, attributes Catholic schools’ academic success to four characteristics:
- A common core of academic work for all students
- A supportive, communal style of organisation
- Decentralised governance
- An inspirational ideology
These are not difficult attributes to reproduce in our schools, but they are dependent on clear leadership on all levels, beginning in the department of education and filtering down to learners via school principals, department heads and educators.
We need to provide a clear reference point for talking about things that pertain to all children in school: behaviour, relationships, self-worth and other everyday issues. An inspirational ideology should be egalitarian and have relevance to all children's lives; it is not set within a specific time frame and is relevant to children of all ages, ability, social class, culture and religion.
As Potterton says, “The young people are restless. We must urgently re-professionalise the teaching profession and improve the status of teachers in the community. Teachers need to be energised to make a contribution to the growth of the nation. And to make this happen, the government urgently needs to give determined, positive leadership. The country needs to know that current conditions are not acceptable and that change will come sooner rather than later.”
However, the government is not a sinecure. Every citizen, particularly those who command most of the wealth, must play a role. Unless we prioritise education, and the development of our youth, we cannot look forward to a country where the doors of learning and culture are open to all.
Mark Potterton
