EC’s improved pass rate masks lost numbers
Opposition parties and Equal Education point to large dropout rates and ‘culling’
Both celebratory fanfare and an outcry has followed the announcement that the Eastern Cape matric pass rate has shot up 5.6% from 65% to 70.6%.
A jubilant newly-appointed MEC of education, Mlungisi Mvoko, however, demanded more, saying the department had to target an 80% pass rate.
But opposition parties and influential education NGO Equal Education accused the education department of hiding huge numbers of pupils who were victims of administrative ‘culling’ or ‘gatekeeping’.
Speaking at the tabling of the technical report at a media briefing at the Education Learning Institute in Stirling on Friday, the MEC said: “Getting to 70% is a huge achievement for the province but we all know it is not enough and now we have set ourselves the task of joining the top four provinces in the 80% league.”
He said for the first time since the introduction of the National Senior Certificate (NSC) 10 years ago, the class of 2018 had managed to break into the 70% range.
He said no school in the province had received a 0% pass rate, as in the past.
Some of the top 50 schools which recorded a 100% pass rate included Ulwazi High in Mdantsane, Clarendon High in East London and Mzamowethu High in Mzamomhle township in Gonubie.
Efata school for the blind and deaf, which was one of the first 10 special needs schools to write the sign language exams introduced in 2018, also managed to make it to the top 50 schools when all nine of its pupils passed.
The top three districts were Nelson Mandela Bay, with a pass rate of 76,1 %, followed by Sarah Baartman at 73,1% and Buffalo City Metro with 73%.
Only one district, Amathole West, performed below 60%.
Equal Education spokesperson Leanne Jansen-Thomas dubbed the matric pass rate announcement “a misleading fanfare that, on its own, provides a poor indication of the overall health of the basic education system”.
Jansen-Thomas said that without access to more detailed data, the percentage measurement was crude and heavily affected by pupils who repeated grades or left school to attend technical and vocational education training (TVET) colleges.
“It remains absurd that the department of basic education has insisted on ranking provinces in terms of matric pass rates each year,” she said.
“This annual announcement, based on the traditional pass rate, not only fails to consider pupil dropout rates, it also ignores the immense contextual disparities between rural and urban provinces.
“The provinces that reflected the largest improvements in their 2017 pass rates – Eastern Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal – were also the provinces with the biggest decrease in pupils who wrote the matric exams.
“This points to a worrying practice commonly associated with high-stakes testing, often referred to as ‘culling’ or ‘gate-keeping’.
“Teachers or principals sometimes hold pupils back in grade11 or encourage them to take different subjects in order to improve pass rates,” she said.
Eastern Cape DA MPL Edmund van Vuuren said that of the 106,599 pupils in the province who enrolled for matric at the start of 2018, only 65,733 wrote their final exams.
“What happened to the other 40,866 pupils? Were they culled to boost the final pass rate?” he said.
He claimed only 31,3% of pupils passed.
Van Vuuren also said 148,346 pupils had registered for grade 10 in 2016, “which means 82,613 pupils have fallen by the wayside”.
In his response, education superintendent-general Themba Kojana said the department could not solely be blamed for the high dropout rate, saying it was also a “societal matter”.
“For instance, 13% of the pupils who started in school in 2004 had already left the school system in 2005 due to various societal challenges, such as death.
“It is unfair to throw this at the department, but what we can do is to work with other departments such as home affairs to trace down those pupils to see what happened, and where they are,” he said.
Provincial education spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima said the 40,866 pupils were progressed pupils who registered as part-time candidates and who were given multiple exam opportunities.