Online registration is not the answer to our schooling woes

So the Gauteng Department of Education’s online registration process got under way on Monday.

I’m afraid I’m conflicted on the issue – I know that there are schools who use lack of capacity as an excuse for hanging on to exclusivity, which in the South African context means keeping children of a certain race or social category out – but I also acknowledge that there are diversionary tactics at work here: the government is using the “all schools belong to everyone” line to cover up the fact that in 25 years they have done little to improve the overall supply of quality school education.

Instead their answer is to make well-functioning schools in the suburbs admit kids from areas quite remote from them where the schools are dysfunctional.

Gauteng MEC for Education Panyazi Lesufi tweeted on Monday, in response to the common assertion that the online recruitment policy is a way of bringing the top down rather that lifting the bottom up:

If your ancestors didn’t give us gutter education dysfunctional schools won’t exist. Beside, all schools belong to all our children. Gauteng is the number Province in terms of education so your accusation is baseless. Out of the top 10 Districts in the country 8 are in Gauteng

He’s right. Apartheid education was designed to produce inferior schooling and the underperforming, dysfunctional system that we are saddled with has its origins there.

To redress those massive, intentional imbalances was never going to be easy, even in 25 years. I’m not so arrogant to suggest that I know what should be done, but I do think that as a tax-payer, one who has education at heart, I have the right to expect an honest attempt to at least get on the right road to recovery.

I’m afraid the current state of affairs doesn’t provide much evidence to support that having happened. Mr Lesufi’s insinuation that the schools in Gauteng aren’t dysfunction based on the fact that Gauteng achieved the top overall pass rate in the matric exams at the end of last year doesn’t really tell the story.

In the first instance, it’s based on just that one measure – the grade 12 examination. The ANA (annual national assessments) were dropped in 2015, remember, at the insistence of the teacher union, SADTU, who recognised that they were a way of holding their members accountable for their performance.

I’ll speak later about what I think can be done to eliminate the equality without lowering standards at the performing schools, but a good place to start would be to break the power of SADTU. Get all the teachers to do their jobs and, without doing anything else, there will be a significant and immediate improvement.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of the throughput rate. The Matric pass rate may be rising, but we should remember that only about 40%, on average, of the kids who began school 12 years earlier actually go right through to the end of the grade 12 year and the final exams. Taking that into consideration the 75% pass rate published is probably closer to 50%. And research has shown that the province with the highest pass rates have had the biggest decline in numbers of learners writing the final exams.

So, maybe things are going as well in Gauteng as what the MEC would have us believe.

The bottom line is that we have too many schools that aren’t functioning properly. The children exiting those schools, without a quality education, are largely doomed to unemployment and poverty. That’s a major factor in the ongoing inequality in the land.

Making the schools in the suburbs, who are functioning well take in those children won’t solve the problem. They will never have the capacity to do so and, yes, they do want to maintain their standards – standards that are often dependent on the financial support of parents and alumni.

Changing the rules governing intake to allow the kids from the townships to attend them is a good thing, in principle, especially is those schools are being intentionally elitist and reactionary. But it would be a better thing to fix the township schools so the kids can get an equally good education in the communities they live in.

It’s the responsibility of a community to raise its children. The school should be at the centre of the community with the teachers, parents and community organisations all contributing to the cause.

A child who travels for an hour and a half each way, via two taxis, to a school on the other side of town is at a disadvantage. And it’s just about impossible for her parents to become part of that school community.

So, what can be done? Well, as I said you can rein the unions in. Then you can invest in leadership development for principals. There isn’t a good school that doesn’t have a good leader. The outlier schools in the townships that produce great results with limited resources can inevitably be explained by the presence of a principal who insists on excellence and who leads his/her team to achieve it.

Most importantly, the children need to attend the local school. That way the community can work together to raise them. That’s the only way it can be done properly.

The high-tech online registration system, as well-intentioned as it may be, is working directly against that.