Monthly Archives: September 2015

Before leaving I thought It would be a good idea to do a bit of a ‘brain-dump’ on my blog to update everyone on the things that I know about in the South African education space. Some of these might be very well known but I imagine some of them are less well known. In any event I think it’ll be helpful. If you know of any other ‘useful-to-know-about’ projects please include them in the comments to this post. And just for shits and giggles I’ve included some GIFs 🙂

• The matric pass rate will drop this year. You just need to look at the gigantic matric cohort that we have this year – in fact, if my calculations are correct it is *the* biggest matric cohort we have ever had! One can only conclude that this is because of the automatic-progression law that’s now being applied to the FET phase. There are 687,230 students enrolled in matric this year, compared to 571,819 last year. Enough said.

• Speaking of matric, let’s briefly touch on the perennial no-brainer that is always politicized and therefore scrapped – testing prospective matric markers. Every year the Minister says prospective matric markers will need to write a competency test prior to being appointed and every year SADTU opposes it and it’s scrapped at the last minute. This article of mine from 2013 is just as true today as it was then, unfortunately. I think this is a good litmus-test of whether the Minister or the new DG mean business. If the research shows that many teachers lack basic content knowledge of the subjects they are teaching and marking – and it definitely does – then we need to be asking why prospective markers are not required to prove they can assess accurately? (except in the Western Cape where testing prospective matric markers has been in place for many years already).

• We now have a new Director General of Basic Education, Mr Mweli. This position has been essentially vacant (i.e. no permanent DG) for more than a few years now. It will be very interesting to see what he chooses to prioritise in his time as DG.

• The results of the SACMEQ 2013 (Gr6) national testing and the TIMSS-Numeracy 2014 (Gr5) study should be released soon. As an aside South Africa is seriously thinking about taking part in PISA-for-Development in 2017 which will be great – more on that in the future (I’m working at PISA next year). The SACMEQ 2013 results are very important. I am really looking forward to seeing what they show.

• The for-profit sector will continue to grow rapidly in South Africa in the coming decade, largely because the majority of public schools are dysfunctional. The ‘low-fee’ sector will grow the fastest as entrepreneurs and investors see the potential for huge growth and massive returns (with or without State subsidies).

• See my presentation to the IEB on for-profit schooling in SA here. To give you an idea about the growth of Curro students/schools, for example, see the graph below:

• Nick Taylor, one of the education champions in South Africa, is pushing ahead with his Initial Teacher Education Research Project (ITREP) – see here. It aims to identify to what extent we are producing teachers who are better able to address the challenges of schooling. The initial results have found especially damning results for university’s existing teacher training programs. Hopefully the positive energy and attention will lead to reform. Nick is also involved in a cool (and important) project aimed at creating communities of practice for Primary numeracy and literacy researchers in South Africa. Both of which show serious promise.

• The education technology space in South Africa (and in the world generally) is booming. Billions of Rands have been allocated to technology in both Gauteng and the Western Cape. I have been meaning to write an article about this for a long time but haven’t got around to it yet unfortunately. In light of this move we would all do well to read this chapter “Computers in schools: Why governments should do their homework.” But we will go around the mountain one more time and check for ourselves. Because how do you know if it’s a dead-end until you’ve tried it?

• Well, maybe because everyone else tried to do exactly what we are proposing to do and it didn’t work? If you’re not teaching teachers how to use the tech (and doing it properly in a hands-on, in-classroom way), budgeting for maintenance and most importantly evaluating the project (to figure out if it’s actually working) then it’s pretty much doomed to fail. As they say in the chapter above “The evidence so far is quite persuasive that programs that overlook teacher training and the development of software may yield low returns” (p169). Importantly we should be asking where these budgets are coming from. Is it wise to be spending billions in untested, unevaluated technology when we still have 500,000 disabled students out of school? (see my presentation to SANASE AGM here).  I’m all for using tech in meaningful ways but this isn’t that, this is basically “Let them eat iPads.” (also see this NYT article, “Can you have too much tech?“).

• On a positive note there is a really important Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) currently underway in the North West, Kudos to the DBE, Stephen Taylor, Brahm Fleisch, Nompumelelo Moholwane and their team for initiating this one. See here for a write-up about it. It’s basically trying to find the best way of teaching reading in the early grades, testing alternatives against each other to find the one with the biggest impact and the most-effective alternative. For those not familiar with the RCT methodology, read this document written for the UK Parliament. I am really looking forward to the results from this study. They have important ramifications for how we ‘teach’ early grade reading in South Africa.

And then some of my ‘usual’ links:

• Presentations from our Quantitative Research in Education conference. Many of these papers have been developed into full articles and will be available in a special issue of the SAJCE –Priorities and Policy-making in South African Education – which should be out later this year. In the mean time I would strongly recommend going through Gabrielle Wills’ presentation on the principal labour-market in South Africa. She estimates that due to the ageing profile of principals that there will be 7000 principal replacements between 2012 and 2017 in South Africa. That’s enormous.

• South African General Household Survey (GHS) 2013 Report: Focus on Schooling
• Many of the U.S. Ivy League universities spend more money on private equity managers (who manage their endowments) than on their students. Great NYT Article “Stop Universities Hoarding Money“

• The Auditor General of South Africa has released their special report on the Education Sector in South Africa – see here.
• One school in California has decided to ban grade-based promotion and has moved to a performance/competence criteria for promotion. Interesting, innovative, forward-thinking. More of this please…
• The New York Public Library has put 20,000 high-res images of maps online and makes them free to download (via Kelsey).
• Before deciding on your opinion about racism (or the lack thereof) at Stellenbosch University (or the Open Stellenbosch movement) watch this 30-minute documentary about the experiences of 32 black students at the University. My thoughts on this: (1) The current pace of transformation is too slow, (2) the current culture at the University is experienced as exclusionary by Black students, (3) While not its explicit aim, the current language policy at SU has the effect of excluding many Black students from quality higher education (in a country where such quality higher education is rare), (4) these issues will not go away until deep, meaningful and sustained reforms (which will be difficult) are implemented at the University, (5) disciplinary hearings and expulsions for protesting students is *totally* the wrong approach to deal with this (one wonders who is advising those in management?!). Watch the documentary for yourself and let me know what you think…

Some presentations I’ve given in the last 2 months:

• September 2015. Exploring relationships between Oral Reading Fluency and comprehension amongst ESL learners in South Africa, Economic Society of South Africa Conference, Cape Town.
• September 2015. Getting Reading Right in the Foundation Phase. Presentation to the VW Foundation, Uitenhage (Speech here)
• September 2015. For-profit schooling in South Africa, an overview for the Independent Examinations Board (IEB) board. Johannesburg.
• August 2015. An overview of South Africa education and children with disabilities that are out of school. SANASE Conference, Johannesburg.

That’s all for now.