Dear blog readers and South African education folk,
After more than a decade at RESEP I’m excited to announce that I’ve now moved to the Gates Foundation as Senior Program Officer within Global Education. Starting this week I’ll be based in Joburg and working with Ben Piper and the rest of the Global Ed team trying to move the needle on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in Africa. If there’s one thing I am absolutely convinced about, it’s that children need to learn how to read, write and calculate if they are to live dignified lives in the 21st century. It’s difficult to think how we reach a more equitable, prosperous and sustainable world without ensuring everyone accesses the foundation on which everything else builds. I’m very happy to keep cracking away at that nut.
When I think back on the last ten years in Cape Town it’s been a fantastic whirlwind with so many more highs than lows. My friends and colleagues at RESEP are some of the smartest and most committed people I know. When I arrived in Stellenbosch not knowing anyone, I didn’t realize how lucky I was to land in the Goldilocks Zone of academia. Surrounded by smart people working on important projects who care about policy and implementation, not just impact factors and petty politics. They were collegial and kind and willing to put up with the hubris of youth as my hard edges got knocked off over time. Now mostly gone 😉 Chief among them was Servaas van der Berg (my M and PhD supervisor) who really is like Grandfather Time, mentoring a small village of researchers out of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of optimism, insight and patience.
Soon after that I moved part-time to the Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropic ecosystem. A neighborhood of cool programs and thoughtful leaders who prioritize trust, integrity and impact above almost everything else. Ant, Rob and Zim I’m really grateful you all agreed to come along for the ride on Funda Wande, NIDS-CRAM and a host of other projects that those with weaker stomachs would’ve balked at. With help from friends and funders we started Funda Wande which morphed and grew in fits and starts, becoming an incredible and impactful organization that I’m still proud to be associated with.
Am I sad to be “leaving” RESEP, the only academic home I’ve ever known? Yes and no. You can’t really ‘leave’ ongoing relationships of trust and respect. Besides that, there is now a whole new crop of bright RESEP PhD students and postdocs whose time it is to step up to the plate and become the next generation of researchers and lecturers.
I’m really excited to do more work on the continent and see what we can do to support organizations and individuals who see the challenges in their countries, correctly diagnose the underlying problems and are working in bold and innovative ways to solve them.
Is SA’s schooling system the “worst in the world”? Earlier in 2023 the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) released a series of reports claiming that it was. It argued that “we are either last or in the bottom three countries” and that we have “one of the worst-performing education systems in the world.” This is simply not true.
There are 193 countries in the world and SA — to its credit — is one of the few that chooses to participate in global assessments such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls grade 4) or the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS grade 5 and 9). The CDE report was quick to claim that we came “last” but slow to acknowledge that only 40 countries wrote the test and only 13 were middle-income countries.
So, of the 193 countries of the world, only 20% wrote the Pirls test, with 150-odd countries not participating. It is true that we perform worse than some poorer African countries such as Kenya, Mauritius and the Seychelles, but 75% of African countries do not participate in that assessment (Seacmeq: the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality), and judging by other education data, SA would almost certainly perform better than most of these, as it should.
We love to compare SA to Kenya or Zimbabwe, lamenting how bad our education system is compared to theirs. But we need some perspective.
In 2018 less than 10% of Zimbabwean children completed high school, with about 40% in Kenya and 50% in SA. By 2022 that figure was 62% in SA. We won’t talk about the Seychelles because it has only 100,000 people. That is the population of Kroonstad. When it comes to higher education there is no contest, with the top five universities on the continent all in SA (the universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Pretoria).
A lot of people rightly point to the superficiality of rankings. So how have we done historically on the most important indicator — learning outcomes?
The Human Sciences Research Council has shown that SA’s improvement in maths and science at grade 9 level between 2003 and 2015 was the largest of all participating countries in TIMSS over that period. Similarly in reading, between 2011 and 2016 SA was the fastest improver among Pirls countries, with similar gains in Sacmeq.
Of course, SA is starting from a low base, yet this is nevertheless an impressive achievement. For a decade we were one of the fastest-improving countries among those who measure their systems. The pandemic was a major setback for this trajectory of improvement, and the losses cannot be overstated. Without targeted catch-up interventions to remediate these learning losses, we will see a “lost generation”.’
Most South Africans also do not know that we have the second-most comprehensive school feeding system in the world. Only Brazil feeds a higher proportion of its schoolchildren. Every weekday 9-million children in SA receive a free meal at school. This achievement is notwithstanding the KwaZulu-Natal school feeding scandal earlier in 2023.
This lasted for less than one month. At the start of the school term on 12 April 2023 it was clear there was a problem, with widespread media coverage and public outrage. Before the end of April the problem was resolved and the dodgy tender was terminated. Of course, it would have been better had there been no lapse in the first place, but this looks a lot like working institutions in a functioning democracy.
It is important to highlight that when the government sets its mind to something — as the minister did with universalising free learner Workbooks or free school meals — it can successfully implement bold programmes that reach into every school and improve learning outcomes. When 50% of children in no-fee schools do not know the letters of the alphabet by the end of grade 1, and 81% of grade 4s cannot read for meaning in any language, it’s clear to me that we need a laser focus on reading in the early grades.
Pretending there is nothing good to work from in SA leads to energy-sapping despair. Yes, we are far below where we should be given our level of economic development and spending on education. We also perform worse than many comparator countries, yet claims that we are the “worst in the world” are misleading, incorrect and unhelpful.
• Nic Spaull is an associate professor of economics at Stellenbosch University
This article first appeared in the Business Day on the 28th of July 2023.
This week I read Nicholas Kristof’s piece in the New York Times “Mississippi is offering lessons for America on Education” and came across the Barksdale Reading Institute which seems to have a wide collection of really useful resources for teacher training on reading. See here.
On Tuesday the 16th of May 2023 the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) released the findings from their 2021 survey. South Africa was one of 57 countries and regions that participated. is an independently administered, nationally representative assessment of reading comprehension among a sample of Grade 4 learners in South Africa. In 2021 the survey included 321 primary schools and tested 12,426 Grade 4 students between August to November 2021. South Africa has participated in PIRLS four times (2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021). The tests are set by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and implemented in South Africa by the Center for Evaluation and Assessment (CEA) at the University of Pretoria. The tests are comparable over time and across countries, with all tests translated into the official languages of each country. In South Africa all 11 languages are tested. Children are tested in Grade 4 in whatever the language of instruction is from Grades 1-3 in the school (i.e. an isiZulu learner in an isiZulu school in KZN would write the test in isiZulu). The SA 2021 Highlights Report is available here and the International 2021 Report is available here.
Here are the 10 main findings in my opinion (also in PDF here):
(1) In 2021 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language, up from 78% in 2016.
This means that only 19% of South African Grade 4 children could read for meaning in any language in 2021 (all 11 languages were assessed). Because PIRLS is a nationally-representative sample, of the 1,127,877 Grade 4 students in 2021, 914,000 could not read for meaning in any language. SA’s PIRLS score dropped from 320 (2016) to 288 (2021), approximately 0,8 years of learning.
(2) We have lost a decade of progress.
Between 2006 and 2016 the percentage of children that could not read declined from 87% (2006) to 82% (2011) to 78% (2016), but has now increased back to 81% (2021), wiping out a decade of slow progress and taking us back to 2011 levels of achievement.
(3) SA came last of all 57 countries, with the largest decline between 2016 & 2021.
South Africa had the lowest average Grade 4 test score of all participating countries. Of the 57 countries/regions, 33 had trend data from 2016 to 2021. Of those with trend data, South Africa experienced the largest decline in learning outcomes between 2016 and 2021.
(4) The average Gr4 child in SA in 2021 was 80% of a year behind their counterpart in 2016
SA’s PIRLS score dropped from 320 (2016) to 288 (2021). Given that approximately 40 points is equal to one year of learning, this is approximately 0,8 years of learning that we’ve lost on average.
(5) Northern rural provinces experienced the largest declines in reading.
Four provinces experienced declines of more than a full year of learning between 2016 and 2021. Given that 40 points amounts to one year of learning, this was as follows: North West (-2,4yrs), Free State (-1,6yrs), Mpumalanga (-1,2yrs) and Limpopo (-1yr). The three coastal provinces (WC, KZN and EC) experienced the smallest declines with WC showing the smallest decline (-0,4yrs).
(6) English and Afrikaans schools did not experience a decline between 2016 and 2021.
In comparison, most African language schools did decline, highlighting that the pandemic increased inequality between no-fee and fee-charging schools. (Note that the marginal increase in average scores for English and Afrikaans LOLT schools between 2016 and 2021 is not statistically significant. We do not yet have the standard errors for provincial averages since the DBE has not released the full South Africa PIRLS 2021 report (despite having access to it).
(7) Brazilian Grade 4’s are 3 years ahead of South African Grade 4’s.
The average score in Brazil was 419 points in 2021 compared to South Africa’s 288 points. The average Grade 4 child in South Africa is 3,3 years behind the average Brazilian Grade 4 child. In Brazil 61% of Grade 4’s could read at a basic level in 2021 compared to 19% in South Africa. Note that Brazil and South Africa have roughly the same GDP/capita ($7000/capita). See my Business Day op-ed on what we can learn from Brazil here.
(8) SA had the largest gender gap (pro-girl) of all 57 participating countries/regions, with SA girls 1,5 years ahead of SA boys.
The average Grade 4 girl in South Africa scored 57 points higher than the average Grade 4 boy, placing them about 1,5 years of learning ahead of their male counterparts. While girls outperform boys in all countries, the South African gap is more than twice the international average gap between boys and girls.
(9) SA does not currently have a credible or budgeted plan to catch up learning losses, despite experiencing the largest decline between 2016 and 2021.
It should be noted that PIRLS 2021 is the first nationally representative indication of learning losses to date. To quote a recent research report reviewing DBE’s interventions relating to COVID-19 “There has been no attempt to recoup time in order to remediate learning losses, apart from very recent attempts in one province. The insistence on a largely business-as-usual approach to curriculum implementation fails to recognise and address the severe educational impact of the pandemic, especially on learners in the poorest communities (Hoadley, 2023: p.1). By contrast, many countries have multi-billion rand catch-up programs, for example Colombia’s PROMISE program (R3,5-billion), the Indian state of Gujarat’s GOAL initiative (R9,5-billion), the Recovering Learning Losses program in northern Brazil (R4,8-billion), or the R7,3-billion ‘2023 Plan de Ractivación Educativa’ in Chile announced last month, acknowledging it will take at least four years to catch up the learning losses from COVID-19. Only one province (WC) has so far announced a budgeted plan for catching up learning losses (WCED’s R1,2bn ‘Back on Track’ program).
(10) A ‘generational catastrophe’
The new PIRLS 2021 reveal what can arguably be referred to as a ‘generational catastrophe.’ More than 4-million children in primary school have experienced more than half their schooling career in a disrupted state (either school closures or rotational timetables). Research on school closures from natural disasters like earthquakes in Pakistan and the Ebola crisis in West Africa all show that there are long term consequences to short term crises. These include lower educational attainment, lower earnings, higher unemployment and being more likely to be in lower skilled occupations in adulthood. This effect might even carry over to the children of the children affected by school closures, as happened with school closures in Argentina.
What can be done?
Evidence-based interventions to catch up learning losses. South Africa has the benefit of numerous interventions that have been proven to raise learning outcomes, even in no fee schools and in poorer provinces. These have been summarized in a recent book published by Oxford University Press (Spaull & Taylor, 2022)
(1) Recruiting, training and equipping youth to be Teacher Assistants. Teaching assistants help teachers deal with large classes and different learning levels of children. A successful program in Limpopo selected youth using numeracy and literacy tests, trained them for four days face-to-face per term, equipped them with workbooks to use and monitored and supported them with TA-mentors (seeMakaluza & Mpeta, 2022). This resulted in substantial improvements to literacy and numeracy equivalent to more than 1 additional year of learning. The government’s Presidential Youth Employment Initiative (PYEI) Basic Education Employment Initiative (BEEI) has established the organizational, political and financial feasibility of operating a teacher assistant programme at scale. The Limpopo programme demonstrates that it is also feasible to meaningfully impact learning outcomes and provides a model for recruitment, training and mentoring to achieve that. Subsequent iterations of the PYEI / Jobs Fund program could incorporate these learnings to catch up learning losses.
(2) Rolling out anthologies of graded readers to all grade 1-3 children. Most children do not have basic texts needed to learn how to read in their home language at school or at home. This can be remedied using low cost anthologies of graded readers that cost R15/book/child. For a brief period of 2 years (2019 and 2020) the Eastern Cape Department of Basic Education rolled out anthologies of graded readers – essentially a set of about 20 sequenced stories aimed at teaching children to read in their home language. The program was evaluated and shown to improve reading outcomes in isiXhosa for the children who received them compared to previous cohorts in the same schools who did not (seeArdington & Spaull, 2022).
(3) Training teachers face-to-face and equipping them with comprehensive workbooksand teacher guides: (Ardington, 2023). Research in Limpopo shows that equipping learners with workbooks and teachers with teacher guides, in addition to four days of face-to-face training per term led to a 60% of a year of learning increase compared to business-as-usual schools.
(4) Using teacher-coaches to support teachers on how to teach reading. The DBE’s Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS) shows that reading outcomes of Grade 1-3 learners improve after at least 2 years of an expert reading coach supporting and visiting teachers in the schools.
About 2,000 years ago Stoic philosopher Seneca was tutoring a Roman emperor and offered him the following advice: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favourable.” The lesson here concerns the importance of planning and having a goal to know where you’re going. Unfortunately, when it comes to early grade reading in SA we are a ship at sea without a port in sight or plan in hand.
On Tuesday we learnt that in 2021 81% of SA grade 4s couldn’t read a few simple paragraphs in their home language and answer basic literal questions. This is according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), a grade 4 test that was administered in all 11 languages in SA (SA highlights report here, international report here).
It’s not as if this was just a pandemic thing — the SA illiteracy rate in the last Pirls (2016) was 78%. This high rate of grade 4 illiteracy is unique to SA, at least among middle-income countries. The latest survey showed far lower rates in countries such as Egypt (55%), Jordan (53%) and Brazil (49%), all of which wrote the same test, at the same time, in their own languages.
Another shocking finding was that grade 4s in SA were three years behind grade 4s in Brazil, a country we like to compare ourselves to, perhaps optimistically. Brazil is an interesting case. Under former president Jair Bolsonaro the education budget was slashed, and he scrapped a successful national literacy programme.
When Lula da Silva was re-elected president earlier in 2023, his first move was to reverse the budget cuts in education and appoint Camilo Santana as education minister. Santana was the governor of Ceará, one of the poorest states in Brazil, but also the fastest-improving state on reading outcomes over the past 20 years. Ceará moved from poverty pariah to poster child, with countries now sending delegations to understand how they managed to get 84% of grade 3s reading for meaning.
Just two decades before, 40% of grade 3s in the state couldn’t read a single word. Going further, three months ago Lula created a new presidential secretariat dedicated specifically to books and literacy. For us in SA this is a parable of what’s possible with a president who follows words with actions, and who appoints ministers who are relentless about well-defined goals.
You will recall that in 2019 President Cyril Ramaphosa announced in his state of the nation address that early grade reading was one of his administration’s “top five priorities” and that “within the next 10 years … every 10-year-old will be able to read for meaning”.
This was then codified in the medium-term strategic framework as one of “five fundamental goals”, alongside halving violent crime, increasing employment, eliminating hunger and promoting economic growth. But a goal is not a plan. Four years on from those lofty words, where are we on reading?
There is still no national reading plan, and if anything things have got worse. We have no plan to retrain our teachers, eliminate extreme class sizes, or resource classrooms with the specific books and tools teachers need to teach reading (graded readers, story books, alphabet friezes, etc). Instead, we have a patchwork document that saw the light of day only in May, and then only in response to Carte Blanche’s Promotion of Access to Information Act request.
We have no plan to retrain our teachers, eliminate extreme class sizes, or resource classrooms with the specific books and tools teachers need to teach reading.
This shambolic document is a laundry list of 47 activities. There are a few good ideas, but most are random fluff, including my favourite: “Partnerships with big business to include reading materials in food packages (eg ‘Did you know?’ messages in Chappies).” You can’t make this stuff up.
The plan lists targets for each year from 2019-2024, none of which has been reached. This Reworked National Reading Sector Implementation Plan 2019-2024 was released (under duress) only in May 2023, a year before it will expire.
A credible plan comes with credible milestones, a credible budget, a credible team and accountable reporting to political superiors. We have none of those things. Much of the department of basic education’s work on reading is outsourced to the National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT), a quasi-governmental project management office reporting to the director-general and minister. In part this is because the department itself is too slow or unable to execute the wishes of the minister.
The NECT has some good people working for it, but is under-capacitated and under-budgeted for the mandate it seems to have acquired. You cannot retrain 120,000 grade R to grade 3 teachers with a R37m budget, or even a R370m budget for that matter. To provide a sense of scale, we are spending R294bn on basic education in 2023, about 5% of GDP.
One province by itself, the Western Cape, is spending R400m in 2023 on Covid catch-up alone. The NECT, by contrast, is tasked with doing everything under the sun, including technology, maths, science, matric, reading, primary schools, high schools and Covid catch-up.
Coming back to our stoic philosopher, it would seem as if the department has reframed the quote to be more palatable: “If a man knows not what harbour he seeks, any wind is favourable.” So, any activities, big or small, we’re here for you. Chappies partnerships, working with 150 schools here, 1,000 school libraries there, mobilising “Read to Lead” and encouraging teachers to “Drop all And Read”.
The problem with all this chatter is that it lacks prioritisation, it lacks accountability and it lacks budget. The presidency has been loath to hold ministers accountable for tangible, objectively verifiable progress towards a limited number of goals.
We should heed the advice of history. That emperor was Nero, and he ignored Seneca’s advice. In fact, Nero forced him to commit suicide and went on to kill his own mother before burning the city of Rome. It’s where we get the expression “Fiddling while Rome burns”.
This feels especially apt when looking at the mess of 81% of grade 4s being unable to read for meaning, with no plan and no political will to get us out of it. And so, all I can say is: where’s the plan, minister Motshekga? And President Ramaphosa, are you a man of action like Lula, or does your word mean nothing?
This article first appeared in the Business Day on 18 May 2023.
The Latin-americanisation of SA schools: Last month Johnny Steinberg wrote an interesting op-ed for the Business Day ‘Bad education follows on the township exit of the middle classes. He makes the argument that because the middle classes have left public schools in South Africa, and that “public goods crumble when the middle classes exit”, SA no-fee schools will not improve. It’s an interesting argument and has been made before by Luis Crouch around the transition. I often use an extract of an email exchange I had with Luis in 2018 with my students to explain the nuances and trade-offs faced by the ANC around 1994 (see here). I was asking Luis to contextualise his use of the term “the threat of Latin-Americanisation of SA schools” and he explained it as “The notion that not having the middle classes vocally and publicly support public education as a matter of personal rather than abstract interest, because their own children were in private schools, and that this was deleterious to both accountability and budgetarily support, was fairly commonly held in Latin America at the time. Thus the “Latin-Americanization” notion, a term I may have coined in the South African context.” In most senses this did ‘work’ – SA has a relatively small private school sector. The DBE’s 2022 School Realities shows that only 5,5% of children in South Africa attend private schools (what we call ‘Independent Schools’). That figure is around 17% for most Low and Middle Income countries. Yet that hides the fact that fee-charging public schools are in a way semi-private (they allow parents to top-up public funds with private contributions). See Motala & Carel (2019) I don’t think Johnny’s argument is as clean or simple as he makes it out to be. For example, countries with similar levels of inequality – Brazil / Chile – have much better learning outcomes. It also doesn’t explain why, pre-pandemic, learning outcomes were actually improving quite rapidly (see Van der Berg & Gustafsson, 2019). Personally I think the political economy and bureaucracy dynamics (ANC-SADTU) explain more of the lock-jam than he gives credit to. But great to read thoughtful pieces in our media.
The Right to Read: The US Right to Read 2023 Trailer – Glad to see campaigns like this getting momentum. Our own Right to Read & Write published by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) makes similar arguments – essentially that learning to read is a fundamental human right that all are entitled to by virtue of their birth and common humanity.
Chile’s COVID-19 catch-up program: Tutorías 2023 with a great promo video:
WCED’s Back on Track Program: On Thursday the WCED launched it’s R1,2-billion ‘Back on Track‘ program covering tutoring, Saturday classes, holiday camps etc. There is some detail in the presentation but we’ll have to wait for the full roll-out plan with all the details. Very encouraging to see a costed and budgeted plan for COVID catch up that matches the scale of the devastation.
Private schools & PPPs in LMIC: Crawfurd, Hares and Todd (2023) published their paper “The Impact of Private Schools, School Chains and PPPs in Developing Countries” – they conclude that: “The search resulted in over 100 studies on low-cost private schools and PPPs, with a large majority being on low-cost private schools. Our meta-analysis shows moderately strong effects from private schooling, although the limited number of experimental studies find much smaller effects than quasi-experimental studies. This advantage, though, is not nearly enough to help most children reach important learning goals. Turning to policy goals, we find that the private school advantage has not translated to public private partnerships, which have shown limited value in improving quality. They can however represent a lower-cost means of increasing access to school. We also find that private school chains perform little better than individual private schools and have little scope for achieving meaningful scale.”
Tracking FLN donor spending: SEEK Development launched their “Donor Tracker for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN)” The dominance of the United States when it comes to bilateral funding for FLN is significant. Of the $505million spent on FLN in 2020, 68% ($344mil) came from the United States (see below). If you do a deep-dive into US funding specifically you see that the total funding for FLN declined sharply between 2019 ($434mil) and 2020 ($344mil), a 21% decline i na single year. FLN funding is also now a smaller proportion of total funding in 2020 (27% of total) compared to 2019 (30% of total). These are worrying trends since it suggests that the biggest bilateral donor is shifting away from FLN. Great tool to look at funding trends over time.
RISE’s Education Systems Course: The folks at Rise have created an Open Access “Education Systems Course” with lectures and videos. Useful syllabus to catch up on readings in this area.
School feeding in SA: Given the recent furore over the DBE school feeding scheme (NSNP) failures in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, I was reminded of a 2016 report I came across evaluating the NSNP in two districts in the Eastern Cape. Frustrating that even “stock standard” decades long interventions like the NSNP can go pear shaped without proper monitoring.
Racial dynamics in SA: Justine Burns and co-authors published a paper in the AER on “Interaction, Stereotypes, and Performance: Evidence from South Africa.” Fascinating paper: “We exploit a policy designed to randomly allocate roommates in a large South African university to investigate whether interracial interaction affects stereotypes, attitudes and performance. Using implicit association tests, we find that living with a roommate of a different race reduces White students’ negative stereotypes towards Black students and increases interracial friendships. Interaction also affects academic outcomes: Black students improve their GPA, pass more exams and have lower dropout rates. This effect is not driven by roommate’s ability.”
A Moral Education: Garth Greenwell writes an essay for the Yale Review that is at times piercing and other times rambling on “In praise of filth.” I liked the initial discussion about the modern turn (or return) to moralising art and the problems with woke culture categorising art “Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself. The idea that artists should make what they feel compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be protected from responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to disregard the claims of others.”
Learning losses and resisting “back to normal” policies: The New York Times published an article “Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School” (via Brahm Fleisch). Their conclusion is especially apt in South Africa where the modus operandi has been very much “back to normal” in most provinces: “As enticing as it might be to get back to normal, doing so will just leave in place the devastating increase in inequality caused by the pandemic. In many communities, students lost months of learning time. Justice demands that we replace it. We must find creative ways to add new learning opportunities in the summer, after school, on weekends or during a 13th year of school. If we fail to replace what our children lost, we — not the coronavirus — will be responsible for the most inequitable and longest-lasting legacy of the pandemic. But if we succeed, that broader and more responsive system of learning can be our gift to America’s schoolchildren.”
Last week Funda Wande released the midline evaluation of their Limpopo Randomised Control Trial, evaluated by Prof Cally Ardington from UCT. In essence the intervention is 120 schools split into 3 arms of 40 schools each: a control arm, a Materials+training arm, and Materials+training+Teacher-Assistant arm (each teacher received a full-time Teacher Assistant). Although the graphic says “Materials only” – the report shows that actually there was also centralised teacher training (of 4 days per term – 2 for literacy and 2 for numeracy).
The intervention is both a literacy intervention (Funda Wande) and a numeracy intervention (Bala Wande) with the same learners, teachers and schools. The results are incredibly encouraging with a 0,5 standard deviation increase in both reading and mathematics after two years of intervention in the Materials+Training+TA arm. That means that this intervention represents the largest gains we’ve seen in foundational literacy and numeracy in South Africa to date. We can see the gains in terms of standard deviations. But in their presentation to the 2030 Reading Panel, Prof Ardington and Dr Makaluza show the changes in outcomes realtive to the DBE’s new language-specific and grade-specific reading benchmarks.
While the 39-page evaluation report is rich in detail, one of the areas that really stood out to me was the increase in workbook coverage in both the LTSM+Training arm and the LTSM+Training+TA arms:
This intervention shows that unemployed youth, when they are recruited properly (literacy and numeracy tests among other things), trained properly, and supported properly (they have TA mentors), they can have a big impact on reading outcomes in the classroom.
For those interested in what components of reading and mathematics were tested, and how large the impacts were across the treatment arms, these are also in the report and included below:
We have a lot of shit going on in South Africa at the moment. We have ministers coming and going. The power is coming and going. The political winds seem to be more like a series of squalls rather than anything predictable or helpful. And this is all before the 2024 election when everything will get even more uncertain. Yet even in these turbulent times, it is encouraging to note that there are schools and teachers and youth that can pull together and with the right support, training and materials can lead to large improvements in reading outcomes for the young children in their charge.
Congratulations to Dr Nwabisa Makaluza and the entire Limpopo Funda Wande team who ran and implemented this intervention, and to Prof Cally Ardington who has conducted an incredibly useful evaluation of the intervention.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” – MLKJ
On the 7th of February we held the second 2030 Reading Panel meeting. The Panel is comprised of 18 respected South Africans who meet annually to review progress towards the Presidential goal of “All South African children being able to read for meaning by age 10 by 2030”, and provides implementable systemic recommendations to government.
82% of SA Grade 4 kids can’t read, up from 78% pre-pandemic: Before the pandemic it was estimated that 78% of Grade 4 learners could read for meaning (PIRLS 2016), new research based on learning losses in the Western Cape suggests that this has risen to 82% as a result of COVID-19 school closures and rotational timetables.
It will take SA 86 years on our current trajectory to reach 95% of children reading for meaning, i.e. the year 2108.
Pandemic has erased a decade of progress, sending us back to 2011. In 2016 22% of Grade 4 children could read for meaning in SA according to PIRLS. Due to COVID-19 it is estimated that now only 18% can read for meaning, the same level as in 2011, erasing a decade of progress in reading outcomes.
50% of children in no-fee schools do not learn the letters of the alphabet by the end of Grade 1. New research from Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and the North West published in December 2022 shows that less than 50% of children in no-fee schools learn all the letters of the alphabet by the end of Grade 1.
There is currently no National Reading Plan and no national budget for reading. Although the Director General has made reference to a ‘National Reading Plan’ in parliament, no such document exists in the public domain or has been seen by stakeholders. There is also no national budget for improving home-language reading.
Western Cape & Gauteng are both spending more than R100-million over three years to improve reading, the only provinces to do so. The Western Cape is investing in a Reading for Meaning program for Grades 1-3 (2023-2025, R111mil) and Gauteng in their Grade R Program (2022-2024, R107-mil). These are the only provinces to allocate significant budgets to reading (although the Gauteng intervention is 80% donor funded).
Government has spent over R25-billion on PYEI, including Educator Assistants (EA), 10% of which are Reading Champions. As part of its COVID response the Presidency Youth Employment Initiative (PYEI) has employed over 850,000 youth on temporary contracts. It is estimated that 250,000 youth will be appointed in 2023 & approximately 30,000 will be Reading Champions. Although this is a welcome addition, there is currently no face-to-face training for these youth and the only requirement is that they must have passed matric.
Twice as many children learnt to read in Limpopo after a 2-year intervention with trained teacher assistant and new reading workbooks. A new evaluation of the ‘Funda Wande’ intervention in Limpopo (2021-2022) showed that twice as many children learnt to read in the intervention schools (34%) compared to children in comparable schools who did not receive the intervention (18%), the largest gains seen in SA to date. (Full Feb’23 evaluation report here).
The panel found that almost no progress had been made on the 2022 recommendations and therefore reiterated the four recommendations from 2022 and added two more:
Measuring what matters: implementing a universal standardized assessment of reading at the primary school level
Moving from slogans to budgets: allocating meaningful budgets to reading resources and reading interventions not only talking about them
Providing a minimum set of reading resources to all Foundation Phase classrooms (Grade R-3) as a matter of urgency.
A university audit of pre-service teacher education programs.
To publish a National Reading Plan and the budget for its implementation
To improve the implementation of the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative
There are lots of things that are wrong with South Africa at the moment. As I type this our parliament is in the process of deciding whether President Ramaphosa should be subject to an impeachment inquiry. But even when things are dark (literally), and the prospects for improvement are dim, South Africa still has a lot of things going for it. I’ll mention just one of them: a thriving community of scholars who give a shit about the country, who want to do impactful research, and who really care about improving the life chances of poor kids. Not many people know that before COVID hit, South Africa’s learning outcomes were improving quickly. That is to say they were both improving and terrible at the same time – they are not mutually exclusive. This week Oxford University Press published three volumes on (1) Early Grade Reading, (2) Early Grade Mathematics, and (3) Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Interventions. A few years ago a few of us were discussing progress in reading and mathematics outcomes and we all agreed that we know so much more today than we did in 2010. In some areas (TVET and housing, for example) we know almost nothing more in 2022 than we did in 2010. Things are bad and we don’t really know how to improve them at scale. In early grade reading and mathematics things are different. We have much more data now, we have a whole wave of new research and (excitingly) new researchers. We decided that we should write a book to try and document what we now know at the end of the first decade. We quickly realised that it wouldn’t fit into one volume, and so now we have three! Although I suppose I was the chief cat-herder across the volumes, the entire series was a collaborative effort. The folk at Oxford University Press (Megan, Marisa, Ashley and the copy-editors) were efficient, professional, flexible and passionate about the project. Our excellent editorial assistant (Jess Qvist) made sure that no ball remained dropped for too long. My co-editors Lilli, Stephen, Hamsa and Nicky were exactly what you want in academic colleagues – smart, funny, friendly, punctual, and always ready to call you on your bullshit. It’s such a nice way to close off the year to see the books in print, and also as Open Access ePDFs which are free to download. Of course nothing is ever the final word and research is an iterative process so we look forward to everyone’s comments and critiques and will most certainly have an in-person launch event in the new year!
“Collectively the three books bring together 77 authors from disciplines including economics, linguistics, literacy studies, mathematics education, teacher education, and policy studies. Although their domains and methods of analysis may differ, all authors grappled with the same underlying question: why is it that so few young children in South Africa acquire the building blocks of reading and mathematics in the first years of school? While international large-scale assessments have drawn increasing attention to learning outcomes at the primary school level, there is now a broad-based consensus that the roots of the problem lie even earlier than upper primary school. International assessments like PIRLS and TIMSS show that 60–80% of Grade 4 and 5 learners cannot read for meaning or calculate using the four operations, but emerging research documented in these volumes highlights that more than 50% of learners at the end of Grade 1 do not know all the letters of the alphabet, and cannot add and subtract single-digit numbers.
It is this challenge that animates the research across these three volumes, with an analytic focus on lessons learnt in the last decade (2010–2022). While learning outcomes in South Africa before the Covid-19 pandemic were improving quickly by international standards, the chapters included here present evidence for both optimism and alarm. Optimism because system-wide improvements do not happen accidentally or in a vacuum. Alarm because in 2022 it is still the case that the dignity and life-chances of millions of children in South Africa are foreclosed because they do not learn to read for meaning, or do mathematics with understanding in the first three years of school.
As a group of scholars committed to understanding and documenting the roots of both blockages and breakthroughs in reading and mathematics, it is our hope that you, the reader, find this new research interesting, helpful, generative, and challenging.”
If you’re keen to come and work with the RESEP team at Stellenbosch, we’re hiring a Project Administrator either on a 50% basis (R150-250k) or a 75% basis (R225-R375k) depending on qualifications and experience. We are trying to prioritise the diversity of the RESEP team and encourage all interested parties to apply. This position is mainly working on a large new project called the Teacher Demographic Dividend. Nearly half of all publicly employed teachers are aged 50+ and will therefore retire in the next 10-15 years. This will bring both challenges and opportunities.
RESEP is collegial and friendly and we enjoy working with each other. We are also big on creating opportunities for people to grow into new roles.
For more information for this position see below and apply HERE (deadline 5 Dec 2022).
Helpful 2022 report by Equal Education Law Center (EELC) on Underperforming Schools and outlining the existing provisions in the South African Schools Act (specifically 16A and 58B)
Gustafsson & Taylor (2022) RISE report on “The Politics of Improving Learning Outcomes in South Africa” and presentation here. The presentation’s visualisation of one of the key frameworks is nicer than the report’s version, although still quite messy. I like the breakdown between ‘Rationalist Steerers’, ‘Professionalists’ and ‘Empiricists’
A new-ish paper by Das, Singh & Chang (2022) “Test scores and educational opportunities: Panel evidence from five low- and middle-income countries” is a sobering reminder of the primacy of family wealth and socioeconomic status: “A striking implication is that in every country, children from low SES backgrounds who are in the 80th percentile of test scores at age 12 have similar years of completed schooling at age 22 as children from high SES backgrounds who were at the 20th percentile of test scores.”
IEA published a list of “Factsheets” for International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs), for example TIMSS 2019.
RTI (2021) Higher Grounds: Practical Guidelines for Forging Learning Pathways in Upper Primary Education
“Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe” – NASA
It’s that time of the year again! I’ll be teaching my postgraduate Applied Economics of Education course at Stellenbosch University. The course is pitched at the Honors level and runs from the 18th of July to mid-October 2022. The lectures are in-person from 11:15-13:15 on Mondays and in-person STATA pracs on Wednesdays 14:00-16:00, although the lectures are also likely to be live-streamed via Zoom. The full syllabus can be found HERE. If you have a strong interest in the course and would like to apply to be an auditor please complete the Google Form which is inside the course outline. Every year there are a number of local and international auditors that enrich the course by their participation. Approved auditors can join in-person at Stellenbosch (ideal) or electronically via Zoom.
There are a limited number of spaces for auditors and those with a quantitative and/or postgraduate background will have preference, as well as those that can attend in-person in Stellenbosch. Note also that all auditors have to do the readings and hand in the weekly reading reflections as your price of entry. The list of readings can be found in the course outline.
Applications to audit the course close on 13 July 2022.
On the 31st of January and the 1st of February 2022 former Deputy President Dr Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka launched a new initiative – the 2030 Reading Panel. The Chair (Dr Mlambo-Ngcuka) asked me to be the Secretary of the Panel and to write a Background Report documenting some of the research and evidence we have on reading outcomes in South Africa as well as interventions for which we have rigorous evaluations showing gains in learning outcomes. The full 2022 Background Report is available on the Reading Panel website and I will blog some of the main findings in another post.
In addition to the 2022 Background Report there are 13 Advisory Notes by a range of people working in the space of early grade reading in South Africa:
On International Literacy Day, the 8th of September 2021, The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) launched the “Right to Read and Write” at the Constitutional Court. I was one of nineteen authors who contributed to the report over the last two years. I think it is a landmark document and encourage everyone to read it (full report here). I will include only the Preamble and Postscript here to give you a sense of the document, but it is worth reading the whole thing! Minister Motshekga’s short opening speech at the event is also worth watching.
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The Right to Read and Write
Preamble
1.1 Introduction
South African society has one supreme law that stands over and above all others: the Constitution. It is the body of fundamental principles that outlines the legal foundation for the existence of our republic and states the rights and duties of its citizens and those we elect to govern us. One of those fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution is that “Everyone has the right to a basic education” (Section 29(1)(a))
In many senses this particular right is a special right in the Constitution and different from many others since it is ‘immediately realizable.’ Unlike the other socioeconomic rights in the Constitution – such as the rights to housing, to healthcare, to food, water, security, and further education – there is no qualification to the right to a basic education. There is nothing that says the state must work towards the ‘progressive realization’ of the right to a basic education, or that the realization of the right to a basic education is ‘subject to available resources.’ There are only two socioeconomic rights in the entire Constitution that are not subject to such limitations and progressive realization, and these are: (1) The right to a basic education (Section 29(1)(a)) and (2) Children’s core socioeconomic rights to ‘basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services’ (Section 28(1)(c)) This was not an accident. In their wisdom, the drafters of the Constitution recognized that in addition to other necessary measures of redress, it was only through the systematic prioritization of the next generation that South Africa would be able to transcend the multifaceted and far-reaching consequences of apartheid.
When the South African Constitution was being written, it was expressly noted and understood that education would hold a privileged place in the new democratic dispensation. Neither redress nor prosperity would be possible without it. The Constitution’s mandate to ‘free the potential of each person’ was contingent on the realization of this right for all who live in the country. As Constitutional Court Justice Bess Nkabinde ruled:
‘‘The significance of education, in particular basic education, for individual and societal development in our democratic dispensation in the light of the legacy of apartheid, cannot be overlooked… [B]asic education is an important socioeconomic right directed, among other things, at promoting and developing a child‘s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to his or her fullest potential. Basic education also provides a foundation for a child‘s lifetime learning and work opportunities”
– Governing Body of the Juma Musjid Primary School v Essay.
While the unqualified right to a basic education has not been legally contested, it is still not entirely clear what is (and is not) included when one speaks about a ‘basic education’. The Constitution itself does not provide an explication of this right which specifies how it is to be realized and what conditions would need to be met for this right to be said to have been realised or not.
In 2013 the Minister of Basic Education prescribed the Regulations Relating to Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure which set out the ‘necessary resources’ that form the minimum core of this right in terms of infrastructure. Subsequent court interpretations of these regulations demonstrate that South Africa now has a set of defined norms for basic physical infrastructure such as running water, electricity, sanitation, and a safe built-environment (Equal Education v Minister of Basic Education 2019 (1) SA 421, ECB), as well as basic educational materials such as one textbook per subject per child (Minister of Basic Education and Others v Basic Education for All and Others [2016] 1 All SA 369, SCA). This has gone some way to make explicit what the State’s minimum obligations are in the fulfilment of this right, at least in terms of infrastructure and textbooks. To that extent it has begun to explicate or ‘unpack’ the meaning of the right to a basic education by specifying its minimum content.
However, what has been lacking in much of this unfolding process is the specification of minimum outcomes that must be met for the right to a basic education to be said to have been realized for an individual. What is the minimum set of knowledge, skills and dispositions that an individual must possess for their right to a basic education to be said to have been realized? Alternatively, are there certain specific measurable ‘core’ outcomes that, if a child is unable to achieve them, one can say definitively that their right to a basic education (or at least some fundamental component of it) has been denied?
It is the contention of this background paper that one of these minimum ‘core’ outcomes with respect to the right to a basic education, is that a child must be able to read and write with understanding at a basic level, in their home language, by the age of ten. Put differently, this fundamental skill is one of the tools by means of which the constitutional promise is to be fulfilled. Unless and until the child is educated to the requisite minimum level, the constitutional promise remains unfulfilled. The purpose of this document is to provide a clearly articulated, evidence-based, and measurable definition of what it means to “read and write, with understanding, at a basic level.” In so doing it aims to operationalize this right by making one additional core component of the right to a basic education explicit. This component would be the “Right to Read and Write.” Whilst it is clear that the right to a basic education envisaged in the Constitution goes well beyond merely the ability to read and write, it is equally clear that if a child is denied this most basic skill (to read and write with understanding) they have at the same time, also been denied the right to a basic education.
In the same way that the government, the courts and civil society now have a shared understanding of the physical resources that are necessary for the realization of the right to a basic education (textbooks, toilets, teachers etc.), the intention of this document is to move towards a similarly shared understanding of the content of the right to a basic education with respect to outcomes, and to do so by providing a clearly articulated, defensible, measurable, and research-informed definition of what it means to read and write at a basic level.
…
Postscript
The Constitution of South Africa was, and is, one of the landmark achievements of our young democracy. It sets out the rights and obligations of citizens and those we elect to govern us, as well as charting a course to a non-racial society founded on ‘human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms.’ While the Constitution is clear and unequivocal – everyone has the right to a basic education – it is the ongoing task of civil society, government, legislature, and the judiciary to explicate what that means. Rights are not self-fulfilling, nor obligations self-evident.
It has been the aim of this document to put forward a defensible explication of one core component of the right to a basic education, and that is the ‘right to read and write.’ It is our contention here that no child can reach their full potential without being able to read and write for meaning and pleasure. We believe that if that is the case then the onus is on us to find a way to measure this right and whether it has been realized.
By drawing on a wealth of experience and research we have attempted to put forward an evidence-based argument for what it means to read and write at a basic level. It is the role of the Executive branch of government to decide whether it agrees with the above interpretation of this component of the right to a basic education. And it is the role of the Judiciary to adjudicate whether the Executive’s actions and interpretations of this right are in keeping with the text, spirit, and ethos of the Constitution.
The Right to Read and Write:
“Every child in South Africa has the right to read at a basic level, in their home language, by the age of 10. That is to say, they can read and understand a short and simple text and answer 80% of the literal and straight-forward inferential questions they are asked that are based on that text. Approximately 60-80% of these questions should be classified as ‘Very easy’ or ‘Easy’ questions.
“Every child has the right to write at a basic level, in their home language, by the age of 10. That is to say that they can express themselves in writing by using a collection of simple and related sentences with correct grammar and punctuation.”
Presentation: Amory Gethin presented his work with Aroop Chatterjee and Léo Czajka at RESEP’s Brown Bag Lunch in May this year. “Inequality, redistribution, and Growth: Evidence from South Africa, 1993-2019“. Suffice to say that it was the best presentation I’ve seen in 5 years and the paper, when published, is likely to lead to a lot of difficult conversations.
Papers: Two great papers by South African economists: “Picketty comes to South Africa” (Pabon, Leibbrandt and Ranchhod, 2020) and “Exclusive growth? Rapidly increasing top incomes amidst low national growth in South Africa” (Bassier & Woolard, 2020).
LRB: Stefan Collini always writes in a lucid and witty way and Snakes & Ladders is no exception. It’s about meritocracy and what it means. I’m currently working through McCloksey’s “Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics” so I really liked his riposte about the ladder of social mobility:
“Our social imagination is partly constituted by our ruling metaphors, and the key metaphor of the age of meritocracy is ‘the ladder’. As David Cameron put it in 2013: ‘You help people by putting up ladders that they can climb through their own efforts.’ But this may not paint quite as inviting a picture as Cameron hoped. Ladders are confining modes of ascent, which don’t leave much room for choice: there is no overtaking and the direction of travel is fixed, rung by rung. Ladder-speak tends to ignore the fact that ladders are used for descending as much as ascending, and has nothing to say about what happens when someone on the way down meets someone on the way up. And of course there will always be some people who prefer to take the lift. Where, in any case, are all these competitors in the Great Ladder-Climbing Championships trying to get to? The metaphor suggests a once-and-for-all ascent: you climb a ladder to get somewhere; ladder-climbing is not a way of life.”
Tablet: The New National American Elite: America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power. I loved the register more than anything else!
It’s that time of the year again! I’ll be teaching my postgraduate Applied Economics of Education course at Stellenbosch University. The course runs from the 10th of August to the end of October 2021, with in-person lectures from 9:00-11:00 on Tuesdays and in-person STATA pracs from 11:00-13:00. The full syllabus can be found HEREdoc. If you have a strong interest in the course and would like to apply to be an auditor please complete the Google Form which is inside the course outline. Every year there are a number of local and international auditors that enrich the course by their participation. Approved auditors can join in-person at Stellenbosch or electronically via Zoom. There are a limited number of spaces for auditors and those with a quantitative and/or postgraduate background will have preference. Note also that all auditors have to do the readings and hand in the weekly reading reflections as your price of entry! I’ve included the list of readings for each lecture below:
(1) Inequality in South African education
*Spaull, N. (2019). Equity: A price too high to pay? In Spaull, N. & Jansen, J. (eds): South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Springer.
Collini, S. (2021). Snakes and Ladders. London Review of Books. Vol.43 (17) April 2021.
Pabón, F., Leibbrandt, M., Ranchhod, V., & Savage, M. (2021). Picketty comes to South Africa. British Journal of Sociology. 2021 (72) p.106-124
(2) Sampling, assessment, and trends over time
Much of the economics of education involves analyzing sample-based surveys of educational inputs and learning outcomes. Of particular importance are the four international assessments South Africa participates in which are TIMSS (Gr5 & 9 maths and science), PIRLS (Gr4 reading), SACMEQ (Gr6 maths and literacy) and TALIS (teacher survey). This session covers issues of inter-temporal comparability, how surveys sample schools, representivity, basic statistical concepts in sampling, interpreting results from cross-national surveys and some of the literature that has looked at this issues in SA and sub-Saharan Africa. This will also be useful for your pracs.
*Van der Berg, S. & Gustafsson, M. (2019). Educational outcomes in post-apartheid South Africa: Signs of progress despite great inequality. In Spaull, N. & Jansen, J. (eds): South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Springer.
(3) Early grade reading in South Africa: What do we know?
*Spaull, N. & Pretorius, E. (2019). Still falling at the first hurdle: Early grade reading outcomes in South Africa. In Spaull, N. & Jansen, J. (eds): South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Springer.
Gustafsson. 2020. Selected extracts from teacher demand work.
(6) Government plans for South African Education
*Gustafsson, M. (2019). Pursuing change through policy in the schooling sector 2007-2017. In Spaull, N. & Jansen, J. (eds): South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Springer.
(8) #FeesMustFall: Who should pay for higher education?
This ‘lecture’ is actually a class debate. The class will be split into two opposing teams and the motion is “This House believes that higher education should be completely free for all students who are accepted by higher education institutions in South Africa.”
Nic Spaull 