See below for a copy of my article published on Africa Check on the 10th of January (see here).

– See more at: http://africacheck.org/2014/01/10/the-economic-value-of-matric-and-the-potential-of-further-education-colleges/#sthash.okKjoERq.dpuf

• Great article by Andreas Schleicher on the new PISA results – “Are the Chinese cheating in PISA, or are we cheating ourselves?”
• Haroon Bhorat at the DPRU weighs in on the impact of minimum wages in South Africa – see here.
• Sad day for LGBT rights as the Indian Supreme Court overturned a High Court ruling making gay sex punishable by up to life imprisonment. Absolutely bizarre. A quote is apt: “Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument” – Samuel Johnson.
• In stark contrast to the above, The Queen pardoned Alan Turing. The father of modern computing who cracked the Enigma code and helped end World War II was rewarded by the British government by being chemically castrated  for “gross indecency” with a man. He committed suicide two years later. Expect similar stories emerging from Uganda in 60 years time after their anti-gay bill. We have the fundamentalist evangelicals to blame for this one. Another quote: “Prejudice can travel a long way when dressed as religion” – Calestous
• Fabulously well-written New Yorker article: “The Republican War on Competence“
• “The Man who Drove with Mandela” – the movie about Cecil Williams, the gay Communist theatre director who helped Mandela during the struggle. Mandela was disguised as his chauffeur and as a result Williams helped South Africa become one of the most progressive countries on the rights granted to gay people (Thanks Mary Metcalfe)
• “The longer walk to equality” – Economist chart on South African inequality over the lifetime of Mandela (chart above from here).
• Two PDF books by Lewis & Lockheed (2007) I would like to read at some stage: Inexcusable Absence: 1) Why 60 Million Girls Still Aren’t In School and What to do About It 2) Exclusion, Gender and Education: Case studies from the developing world (Marlaine Lockheed is one of the gurus of education in developing countries and she has also developed a great course ”Making Schools Effective in Developing Countries“ (Princeton 2011) which is really worth browsing.
• Quote of the week comes from Aaron Huey’s moving TEDtalk “America’s native prisoners of war” :

“The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, ‘My God, what are these people doing to themselves? They’re killing each other. They’re killing themselves while we watch them die.’ This is how we came to own these United States. This is the legacy of manifest destiny.” 

I don’t repost other people’s articles often but this is too good not to – see Sarah Britten’s article on what the fake signing man says about SA politics below. Pritchett talks about this in his new book referring to it as isomorphic mimicry:

“In our conversation, Lant unpacks the problems inherent in what he calls “isomorphic mimicry”: building institutions and processes in weak states that look like those found in functional states. “They pretend to do the reforms that look like the kind of reforms that successful [countries] do, but without their core underlying functionalities,” says Lant. “Instead, countries wind up with all the trappings of a capable system—institutions, agencies, and ministries—without its functionalities.” from here

On the fifth of December 2013 Nelson Mandela died. He was the father of our country and the greatest man it has ever produced. While we all knew it was coming soon, the finality of death and the fact that his presence is no longer with us is truly saddening and has marked the beginning of a time of national mourning, remembrance and reflection. The picture above is a photo I took yesterday at Kirstenbosch Gardens at the Nelson Mandela sculpture which has become one of thousands of places around the country where people have laid cards and flowers in memory of our first democratic president.  This colorful card by Caleb  was such a gem: “Dear madiba I will miss you so much. thank you for changing all the rules, Love caleb.” It’s difficult to provide a better summary than this parsimonious account. Madiba really did change all the rules – the rules of apartheid, the rules of society and the rules of our country, yes, but also the rules we had allowed to govern ourselves – hatred, unforgiveness, discrimination and oppression. Madiba we will always love you. x

I still want to write a post about Madiba and what he means to me and what he represents to South Africa and the world but that will come later. Till then I really liked Maya Angelou’s tribute poem “His Day is Done” and Desmond Tutu’s tribute to Madiba. [Also this awesome flash mob tribute by the Soweto Gospel Choir in Woolies Parkview]

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Links I liked…

• “Lant Pritchett on Education in Poor Countries” – an EconTalk podcast (64 min) I am definitely going to listen to. Pritchett is always good and Russ Roberts is an excellent interviewer.
• Justin Sandefour summarises the findings from an important low-cost-private-school voucher intervention in Andra Pradesh (by Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman (o_O) whose full article is available here.
• Great 2007 article by Deon Filmer: “Education inequalities around the world” – one of the brightest minds in the field. Really important reading.
• M&G article summarising some of the (encouraging) findings arising from the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS)
• My M&G article: “ANA results are not comparable” explaining why the ANA 2013 results are not comparable to previous ANAs or across grades. Banging the same old drum in the hopes that someone is listening!
• New DBE reports now available online, including one on internal efficiency, macro indicators and the school monitoring survey
• Interesting and disruptive innovation in Kenya – Bridge International Academy offers a school-in-a-box solution where teachers are trained for 7 weeks and offer scripted lessons in a highly structured and specified way. Most educationists will hate it but I just think to myself – what kind of education would these kids be receiving if they weren’t at these pop-up schools? Sometimes the counter-factual is far worse than even a below-average solution.
• “How to speak and write post-modern” – I must say I chortled more than a few times.
• Interesting Economist article on Creationists and Science: “After they hit 18, half of evangelical youngsters lose their faith; entering a public university is especially perilous. As a generation, millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 2000s), are unimpressed by organised anything, let alone organised religion…Recent research (notably cross-species comparisons of gene sequences rendered non-functional by mutations) has greatly strengthened the case that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. A creationist speaker in Baltimore shrugged such discoveries off, declaring that “science changes, but the word of God never changes.”
• Very interesting – Kagame on Rwanda: “Our thinking is based on people,” the tall, lean president tells This is Africa, from his hotel room on a recent trip to New York. “Investing in our people, what our people are capable of. In national budgets, we focus on education, health, we look at technology, skills, innovation, creativity. We are always thinking about people, people, people.” Rwanda looks to South Korea and Singapore, as well as developed countries, for lessons on “the way they managed their problems throughout history. And the central role played by people is very clear,” the president says. “We try to take all of that to our own needs and we have not been disappointed. You never go wrong by investing in people.“
• Pritchett quoting an Indian policy-maker: “You guys from the World Bank say you want to help the government of India with our development agenda but then all you want to talk about is poverty, poverty, poverty. Let me point out two things. First, India is a democracy and hence to be the government at all we have to have 51 percent of the votes and we don’t have that many poor voters. Second, once we are the government of India we are the government of all Indians, not just the poor ones, so our agenda has to reflect the aspirations of all Indians. So either you are really helping us with our development agenda or you are just pushing yours.” Wow. Just wow.
• Two South African education conferences in 2014 that are worth attending – SABEC (31 March JHB) – and SAERA (13 Aug DBN).

The following article should be appearing on the RESEP website sometime today.

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WEF rankings on education unreliable

Each year the World Economic Forum releases its Global Competitiveness Report which aims to “assess the competitiveness landscape” and “provide insight into the drivers of their productivity and prosperity.” They furthermore claim that this report “remains the most comprehensive assessment of national competitiveness worldwide.” Included in the report is an indicator of education quality where South Africa performs extremely poorly (132 of 144).

 Much of the work conducted at RESEP focuses on education in South Africa, the quality of that education and the links between the schooling system and the labour market. Martin Gustafsson, one of the researchers at RESEP, has looked into the WEF rankings on education and discusses four salient features which explain why the WEF rankings on education are especially problematic.

    1. Understandably, the 2012-2013 Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum (WEF) has caused a stir in South Africa as, despite a relatively good overall competitiveness ranking (52 out of 144 countries), a few indicators related to government service delivery, in particular education, put the country amongst the worst in the world. Specifically, in terms of the ‘quality of primary education’ we are at position 132 out of 144, in terms of the net primary enrolment ratio we are at position 115, and in terms of ‘quality of the educational system’ we are at position 140. The 2012-2013 report does not really present anything new. The figures in the previous year’s report (for 2011-2012) are very similar.

 2.      With regard to the educational quality indicators, it is important to bear in mind that the WEF does not make use of any standardised testing system in producing its report. Instead, it makes use of an expert opinion approach. In the case of South Africa, six respondents, all from the business sector, are asked to rate the quality of education along a seven-point scale from very good to very poor. One would expect the South African respondents to rate the quality of South Africa’s schooling poorly for a number of reasons. One is that in South Africa we have good data on our educational quality relative to other countries. In particular, TIMSS 2003 placed South Africa last, with respect to Grade 8 mathematics and physical science, amongst the 20 developing countries that participated (the other African countries participating were Botswana, Egypt, Ghana and Morocco). However, there are around 150 developing countries in the world, many of which have very poor information on the quality of their education systems. One suspects that experts in these countries would not rate their educational quality too poorly as they simply do not have the required information. In SACMEQ 2007, South Africa came ninth out of 15 countries in Grade 6 mathematics. It is noteworthy that although Lesotho did considerably worse than South Africa in SACMEQ, its WEF ranking in the quality of primary schooling indicator is 120, against 132 for South Africa. This illustrates the problem with subjective data on a matter which is relatively amenable to measurement.

 3.      With regard to the primary enrolment ratio, it is important to note that UNESCO’s enrolment ratios (the data source for the WEF) are widely regarded as problematic and often not amenable to useful international comparisons due to the fact that UNESCO calculates its ratios using official enrolment totals and official population totals, in other words information from very different data sources. In many developing countries there are strange discrepancies between the two sets of data. The problem for South Africa is that this discrepancy works in the reverse direction compared to most other developing countries. In South Africa, total population figures for children are simply too high compared to the enrolment totals. In most developing countries, the problem is that enrolment totals are inflated. South Africa’s enrolment ratios in the UNESCO reports appear to be relatively poor, but this means nothing and has confused a lot of people. Enrolment ratios derived from household surveys are a lot more reliable and these indicate that South Africa’s enrolment ratios, at least at the primary and secondary levels, are good by international standards. There is an abundance of literature that shows this. The WEF report itself points to the strangeness of the enrolment ratios it uses. According to the report, at the primary level our enrolment ratio is ranked position 115, but at the secondary level it is ranked 53. This raises an obvious question: How can enrolments at the secondary level be relatively good when at the primary level they are poor, yet the former depends on the latter.

 4.      Lastly, World Bank reports now identify 201 countries in the world.

 Part of Martin’s PhD research involved developing a method to compare the performance of countries on different (sometimes non-overlapping) international assessments of educational achievement. His 2012 Working Paper “More countries, similar results. A nonlinear programming approach to normalising test scores needed for growth regressions” can be found here.

The Department of Basic Education has recently released the report on the School Monitoring Survey of 2011 which surveyed 2000 public ordinary schools with the aim of monitoring progress towards the goals set out in the Action Plan to 2014. Let me warn you that it makes for depressing reading – even for those familiar with how bad things really are. Really. While the results are truly atrocious/shocking/abysmal (we are running out of adjectives to accurately describe the South African schooling system) there is one ray of hope that comes from all of this. It’s not so much the contents of the report – the only thing hopeful in the report are the school feeding stats! – but rather the fact that the report itself was commissioned (surprise #1) and then that it was actually released (massive surprise #2). If we try and walk in the DBE’s moccasins for three days, as the Native American saying on empathy goes, we would realize that this takes commitment, resolve and leadership. To commission a survey that will certainly reveal damning information, but information that is necessary for improvement, is the first step. But to realize that public discussion, transparency and accountability are all integral parts of democracy and progress is something else altogether. That is truly and honestly something to celebrate and a big break with the denialism of previous Ministers of Education. Kudos to those involved! But before you crack out the champagne read the bulleted summary of the report below. Actually, mid-day drinking is probably the most rational response to findings like these…        

1. Only 69% of schools had all allocated teaching posts filled (highest in the Northern Cape: 78%, lowest in the North West: 58%).
2. Of the 60 hours of annual professional development that teachers should have done by the time of the survey, the South African average was only 38 hours (Western Cape: 60 hours, Limpopo: 30 hours).
3. Percentage of educators absent from school on an average day was 6% nationally, 8% in KwaZulu-Natal and 3% in the Western Cape.
4. Of Grade 6 learners nationally, only 7% had done at least 4 exercises per week (the minimum standard) for language and 31% for Maths. Of Grade 9 learners nationally, only 1% met this requirement for language and 6% for Maths.
5. Of Grade 6 learners nationally 83% had access to a Maths textbook and 78% had access to a Language textbook. For Grade 9 the figures were 83% for a Maths textbook and 68% for a Language textbook.
6. Only 57% of students in South Africa were in a school that had either a central school library, a mobile library or a classroom library (Western Cape: 89%, Limpopo: 30%)
7. Only 48% of schools had a School Governing Body that met the minimum criteria for effectiveness.
8. Schools receive different per-learner subsidies from the State depending on if they are from the poorest 20% (Quintile 1), the second Poorest 20% (Quintile 2) etc. Quintile 1 learners get allocated R905 while Quintile 5 (richest 20%) get R156. Nationally 47% of students were in schools that were funded according to the minimum level (Western Cape: 95%; Mpumalanga: 10%).
9. Only 55% of schools have minimum infrastructure needs (Gauteng: 90%; Eastern Cape 33%). Minimum infrastructure needs are defined as having running water, working electricity, fenced school premises, separate toilets for boys and girls, and separate toilets for teachers.
10. 86% of south Africa learners received a free school meal every day (Western Cape & KZN: 81%; Limpopo: 94%). In Quintile 1, 2 and 3 schools, 96, 95 and 91% respectively were found to have a National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP).
11. 87% of schools were visited at least twice a year by a district official for monitoring or support purposes during the year (Western Cape: 99%; Eastern Cape: 74%).
12. Only 34% of principals rated 50% of more of the district support services as satisfactory (Gauteng/Western cape: 63%; Eastern Cape: 24%).

 When we think of what these kind of findings mean for things like social mobility, chronic poverty and the personal dignity of the poor and marginalized it would seem the only reactions are anger and despair.  God help us.

• Carol Paton writes a helpful summary of some of the findings from the NSES book “Creating Effective Schools.” Read it if you consider yourself informed about SA education. Take the “What are policy-makers doing?” things with a pinch of salt – I don’t have time to go into why some of those ‘remedies’ or ‘responses’ aren’t as impressive as they sound. Some are legit though 🙂
• Crazy hectic typhoon hit the Philippines – before/after GIF showing just how much devastation there was. So sad.
• After watching this TED talk I am more convinced than ever that I am a 100% feminist. Actually 110%. If you’ve never done a course on gender or even thought about it, watch this 30min talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – she is humorous, insightful and eloquent, proclaiming what will be such an obvious truth in the future – that we should all be feminists.
• How much is a professor worth? – NYT article comparing the relative salaries (in PPP) across the world (SA ranks pretty high 🙂 – via Johan Fourie
• Concise M&G article on the state of learning deficits in South African education – “Too little, too late condemns pupils” by @Victoria_JohnMG – nice article about part of my CDE report.
• A few weeks ago I got my first experience of live television as part of CNBC Africa’s panel discussing education in South Africa – see here. I could get used to this #JustSayin
• The paper I wrote with Stephen Taylor for Save The Children is now available online: Trends in Effective Enrolment: Measuring Access and Basic-Quality Improvements in Education for Nine African Countries 2000-2007 (perhaps we should’ve thought of a more concise title?!)
• Got a cool idea for social change through education and technology? Shuttleworth Foundation fellowships are now open (deadline 1 May 2014)