South African Education: In Desperate Need of New Ideas

South Africa’s education system needs a radical overhaul, but not what is being proposed by government

Every year the announcement of Matric results in South Africa is a stark reminder of the shocking disparities that continue to exist in the basic education received by South Africa’s children. On the one hand, the Independent Education Board, South Africa’s largest association of private schools, announced a 98,76% pass rate countrywide. On the other hand, the national pass rate for all schools was 81,3%, which admittedly does not sound too bad, but if you consider that only 38% of the learners who enrolled in grade 10 in 2017 managed to pass Matric in 2019, it does look pretty bad.

Despite the evidence that state education in South Africa is failing dismally, the government’s solution offered in the latest Draft Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill is to take further powers away from parents and school governing bodies and vest the powers centrally, with the Department of Basic Education. For example, this Bill proposes to take away the ability of school governing bodies (which represent parents) to appoint school principals and instead to leave this vital decision with an official in the Department of Basic Education. This promises to make things much, much worse.

The absolute foolishness of this approach is easily illustrated when one asks:

Who has a child’s best interests at heart?

The child’s parent, or a government official in some far away city?

and

Who is best placed to assess a teacher’s performance in teaching a child?

The child’s parent, or a government official in some far away city?

The answers to the above are blatantly obvious. Yet the government’s proposed reforms to education seem to be based on the suppositions (i) that the state knows better than parents what their children need; and (ii) that the state can somehow better monitor the performance of thousands of teachers countrywide than a parent can monitor the performance of teachers of their own child.

Unfortunately, this is what we have come to expect from the ANC government, which cares far more about holding on to power by appeasing unions, in this case the teachers’ unions, than providing meaningful change for the people of South Africa.

It is such a cliché, but ultimately the people who suffer most as a result of the ANC’s dismal policy failures are the poorest citizens in our country. But what can we do to change it?

Before we get there, let’s go back to the questions I posed a few paragraphs back.

From those questions it is patently clear that it is vital to vest decision-making power with those who actually know what is best for their children: parents. Rich parents already have the ability to choose where to send their children to school, and it shows — our private basic education system is as good as anywhere in the world. The reason for it is simple, if a private school offers its students a good education it thrives, if it does not, it will simply not survive. Government schools, on the other hand, have no such incentive — if a government school performs poorly, it will in all likelihood get more money from government to try and fix it.

Which takes us to the next vital consideration. Economics teaches us that people and institutions such as schools act on incentives. Instead of ignoring this fact, as the government continues to do (and not only in education), we need to create policies that take this incontrovertible truth into account. Schools, teachers, principals, and government education officials and the like must be rewarded for providing children with a good education while schools, teachers, principal and government education officials that provide a shoddy service must not be allowed to continue to do so.

Once we properly start taking into account these two factors which go hand in hand —(i) parent choice; and (ii) incentives — we can start formulating an effective education policy.

One such education policy, which has been championed by certain economists for decades, would be to drastically reduce direct state spending on basic education. Instead, we should use funds that were previously spent on state education to provide disadvantaged parents with a voucher — of say R20 000 per child — which those parents may use to pay only for that child’s education at any school of their choice (you may ask how government could afford that, but in 2019 government spent about R24 000 per school-going child in SA). In essence, this puts the decision of which schools are to receive funding wholly in parents’ hands, which in turn, will incentivise schools to provide a proper service, or else they simply will run out of money and be shut down.

This will encourage entrepreneurial-minded teachers to start high-quality schools in townships which, if they are well run and provide a good service, will provide such teachers with opportunities to make money. More importantly, it will provide children in townships with the opportunity to receive a quality education which equips them to uplift themselves and their communities.

This policy will invariably be met with great resistance, particularly from unions representing incompetent teachers who would want to make sure that their jobs are protected, no matter how badly they perform. But we cannot let resistance to positive change hold us back any longer. It is up to us as citizens to ensure that ideas such as these become part of the national dialogue.