A Neighbour's Challenge

"We need a Messiah" says one headline.  With fewer than 200 days to go before South Africa hosts the first Africa-based World Cup, what could be a greater national priority than to hire a new coach for South Africa’s football team?  

Well, if Bafana Bafana fail, the price is disappointment for football fans, but if South Africa’s schools continue to fail, the nation will pay a far greater price: continuing and frighteningly high levels of crime, poverty and inequality.

While South Africa’s football establishment looks frantically for a miracle worker to whip their team into world-class shape, many black South African students are looking for their own brand of miracle workers: good teachers.  They are not easy to find.  Why? Because teaching is the least attractive profession in South Africa.

According to Jonathan Jansen, Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State, “no black student in South Africa intends to become a teacher.”  The reasons are clear.  After the standard twelve years of classes in chaotic and unstable schools, schools which follow an unpredictable timetable and yield some of the world’s worst academic results, is it any wonder that, as Jansen puts it,  “black high school graduates would rather stay unemployed than study teaching”?

There are signs that the victims of this cruelly incompetent system – the students themselves -- have had enough.  When was the last time you heard about students protesting a lack of punctuality among their peers and teachers?  It has happened in South Africa.  How about students marching to City Hall, as they did recently in Cape Town, calling for libraries and librarians? 

South African students have good cause to be alarmed.  Three areas that stand out:

1. Most teachers in South Africa were taught in a system that was deliberately inferior: Bantu education.   Their capacity to teach the next generation has been profoundly impaired.  For example, one study found that a majority of teachers of nine-year olds scored less than 50% on a literacy test for 12 year olds.

2. South African teachers presently enjoy the highest levels of unionization in the world but, as Mamphela Ramphele, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, says “their focus is on rights, not responsibilities.”  Absenteeism is all too frequent and, when they do come to school, teachers often arrive late, which helps explain students’ punctuality protests.  Too little time is spent on instruction.  According to one survey, actual teaching time is typically just over three hours a day rather than the five expected.

3. Principals have little power.  They can neither select the teachers in their schools nor discipline those who are frequently absent.  Vacancies commonly go unfilled for months on end. One experienced South African schools’ trainer and consultant, Johan Ryk, who has spoken with many principals, says he frequently hears, “if you want to stop enjoying your life, become a Principal.”

In his aptly named book, The Toxic Mix, about South Africa’s schools and how to fix them, education policy analyst Graeme Bloch sums up the appalling truth: “The stark reality is that some 60-80% of schools today might be called dysfunctional.”

What is to be done?

The good news: we know how to make massive improvements in schools.  In Lessons Learned: How Good Policies Produce Better Schools, Fenton Whelan takes a look at the most successful school systems worldwide and argues that a small number of key changes in schools makes the difference.  Good teachers are the key.

The best-performing schools in the world right now happen to be in Finland, a quirky, old-fashioned and proudly egalitarian country, the only one in Europe that has never had a king or a home-grown aristocracy.

How do they do it?  Finland is better at getting the right people to become teachers than any country on the planet. In sharp contrast to South African undergraduates, Finns regard teaching as the most desirable profession.  Only 15 % of those applying are admitted to teacher training in Finland.  You cannot enter a Finnish classroom, be it in a primary or secondary school, without a Masters degree. 

The results are impressive.  Every three years, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) runs a series of tests known as PISA.  PISA tests 15-year olds in nearly 70 countries in mathematics, science, reading and problem solving.  Finland came top in 2003 and 2006. 

PISA data shows that Finnish students read more books, visit libraries more often, like school more and have better relationships with their teachers than students in other countries.  There’s no such thing as a failing school in Finland.  Astonishingly, the variation in performance between Finnish schools is no more than 4 percent.  Rich or poor, all get the same high quality of education in that country.

Finland’s system isn’t the only game in town.  A quick scan of the educational horizon reveals other innovative ways of getting top graduates, the very best young minds, to enter the classroom.  In 1990, Wendy Kopp, the founder of “Teach For America”, started a programme that currently recruits 4,000 graduates each year and is ranked the 10th best employer in the United States in surveys of final-year university students.  “Teach First”, Britain’s version of Kopp’s initiative, began recruiting graduates from Britain’s top universities in 2002.  

Both Teach for America and Teach First use careful marketing and branding, with links to the private sector.  A full-day assessment centre helps to ensure that they select people with the right skills and attributes to be highly effective teachers.  Only one in five applicants survives.  In 2007, British government inspectors rated Teach First participants as among the best teachers produced by any teacher training route.

So what should South Africa do?   Five actions spring to mind:

1. Learn from Finland.  Take immediate steps to move teaching from a fallback career to a profession with enhanced status, by making the training of teachers far more selective and demanding.
2. Establish a South African version of Teach For America and Teach First so that South Africa’s brightest minds can be put to work on the greatest challenges.
3. Give school principals the power to run their schools properly. 
4. Enforce basic professional standards among the present corps of teachers.
5. Celebrate the achievements of the best teachers, the best principals and the best schools.

 An enduring truth remains: the critical playing field is the classroom, not the football pitch.

Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana.  His email address is: principal.map@gmail.com.  Maru-a-Pula’s website is: www.maruapula.org