The silent crisis that can no amount of spin can negate

With the 2024 elections coming up, and many expecting a change in government, this is an opportune time to put on the table clear and effective strategies for radically changing a school system that remains stranded in a sea of mediocrity.

No doubt this opportune moment was on the mind of the Centre for Development Enterprise (CDE) when it released a powerful report titled The Silent Crisis with the urgent subtitle Time to Fix SA’s Schools.

A liberal, pro-business, independent think-tank, the CDE was drifting into political obscurity until it produced a series of five compact, accessible, wellargued positions on the crisis and how to resolve it.

We already know that the performance of the school system is underwater even in relation to poorer countries that spend less money than SA on the education of children.

We know most of our children cannot read at the grade level and that the system is highly inefficient.

And we know that many of our teachers in the poorest schools lack sufficient knowledge of the subject and how to teach the requisite content.

Then why is nobody in a panic about this silent crisis?

In part because of an elaborate deception that sells the idea that because matric results improve the school system is improving.

In part because we do not have these kinds of analyses that remind the public that our education is in dire straits.

Where the CDE gets it wrong is to assume that good data, solid research and rational argument will change the minds of this government. It will not.

Policymaking in SA is overdetermined by politics and not by scientific reason.

I still have nightmares sitting on the council of the apex academic science council, the Academy of Science of SA, and presenting our scientific work to one minister after the next.

These scientific reports would range from climate change and poverty relief to public health and scholarly publications.

After presentation, 99% of the questions from ministers and their advisers would be about race and representation in our membership, almost nothing about science.

It is always about the primacy of politics, never science.

Nor do I believe, as the CDE does, that the primary problem is corruption and state capture in education.

Yes, there are provinces like KwaZulu-Natal where you can buy a promotion post; there is a comprehensive report that the current minister called for and then buried.

But most provinces are not “captured” in their teacher appointments and promotions.

Sadtu is a spent force these days with their leaders comfortably ensconced and absorbed into positions of power within the ruling party. Why complain when you are being fed?

And I do not believe the key problem is accountability.

To hold teachers and principals to account you need to have political authority that can enforce it, and right now there is no appetite for setting high standards for teaching and learning, for example, and then holding teachers accountable for results.

Try enforcing even simple measures of accountability and you’ll have a revolt; still, under a new government it is worth a try.

What does the CDE get right? The problem is indeed the quality of our teachers.

This can be fixed by a post2024 government in several ways. One is by putting student teachers into schools for 70% of the time under an excellent mentor teacher and only 30% of their time in university classrooms, the exact opposite of what is happening now.

Another is to have standards-based outcomes for inservice teaching that every teacher should be tested for and meet within five- to seven-year cycles of personal accreditation.

The CDE is also right that we need new leadership in public education.

It is not a mystery why our current president returns the same ministers to the same jobs over and over again; these are simple political calculations.

A coalition government can re-set these stale appointments, and give us energetic and effective new leaders of the education portfolio who actually care whether children drown in pit toilets and that our schools come dead last or thereabouts in international tests of achievement.

Most of all, what the CDE gets right is the call for the public to “recognise the depth of our learning and teaching crisis”.

Forget government, this is what we must all do with good research and solid evidence — show the public that our schools are in crisis, and that the consequences of doing nothing are severe for social cohesion, economic growth and political stability.

I believe that there is enough commonsense and goodwill in the SA public that the answer to the CDE’s closing question will be a resounding no:

“Are you prepared to condemn another generation of young South Africans to an appalling education?”