The State of Education – a Teacher’s Perspective

I have taught in a public school for six years now and I’ve got the bite-marks and bald-patches to prove it! I have many stories to tell about my experience in teaching, some happy, some sad, some just down-right strange… but what always piques my interest is when I over-hear people who are not involved in education talking about their assessment of the system. I hear people talking about how the OBE curriculum has failed us, about class sizes and about how the standard of education has been lowered so far that it is now laughable. Well I can’t give you a peppy speech to rival one of our ministers, I’ll leave that to Angie, but what I can offer you is a classroom view of how “the system” operates.

The curriculum

When I first started teaching I was surprised at how little substance there was to the curriculum which was RNCS at that time. I discovered later that this was because of the influence of Outcomes Based Education. The OBE approach is basically a system where the “outcomes” are given by the department without much prescription regarding the way in which to get children to attain those outcomes. What this meant in practice was that the question of “what?” was answered but very little was said about the “how?” There was a lot of talk about professionalism and teachers exercising “professional judgement” but there were no prescribed textbooks and in fact it was frowned upon to systematically teach through any textbook. This always puzzled me. The goal was for the teacher to select from a variety of sources and to craft lessons uniquely suited to the classes that we teach.

I’m sure that a zealous young teacher fresh out of college at a new post in a leafy little class of fifteen would relish the task of developing a unique curriculum every term to express the full breadth of his/her creative teaching genius. I was less excited at the prospect. My first two years of teaching were a blur of energy expended on pulling together teaching materials from a box of different text books to teach the given topics and drafting all assessments for every subject from scratch. I was absolutely spent.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one that was not loving all the admin. In essence the department had foisted the responsibility of curriculum development onto the teachers. It took some time for the massive short-comings of this method to become apparent. In the years since then the curriculum has been revised and the department has attempted to address the problems. In short, the curriculum was too vague. It was too easy to over-teach certain topics at the expense of others and there were massive discrepancies between how or what topics were taught from grade to grade and from school to school.

To make things worse, pass requirements were equally vague so that there was a lot of confusion around whether a particular child could go to the next grade. It was too easy for the external pressures on schools to meet certain pass percentages to influence management’s discretion over whether a particular child had passed or not. To illustrate, terminologies like “pass” or “fail” were discouraged and replaced with words like “ready to progress” and “not ready to progress”. Determining a pass or fail became an exercise of trying to decide if a child had shown enough progression in the year to warrant going on to the next grade or not. The question of “How much progress must a child show?” was left open to interpretation. It was this vagueness in pass requirements that ultimately lead to a lowering of the standard of education because even though it might benefit a child to repeat a grade, it almost never benefits a teacher or a school to have statistics which show a high failure rate in a class.

When I was studying to teach, the curriculum was changing over from NCS to RNCS. It changed again to CAPS while I was teaching and I was sent for re-training. Each revision of the curriculum was a good one, in my opinion, but it chaffed us as teachers that the curriculum kept changing because every time it changed, the expectations placed on us changed with it. Teachers feel unsure if they are meeting the expectations of the curriculum because they feel as though they are constantly learning what the new expectations are. When “curriculum advisors” do their rounds it amplifies the uncertainty that teachers feel because their real intention is not to “advise” us but to hold us to account.

The OBE octopus has been hard to kill and it has left several of its unhelpful tentacles in the practice of the revised curriculum today. The piecemeal approach to planning lessons and assessments which was the appeal of the “versatile” OBE still dogs the present system. It is still frowned upon to teach through a single textbook from which students can learn, be assessed and do remediation. As a result it is not unusual for children to work from several different sources during a lesson. Their assessments come from yet other sources and the same holds true for remediation. This constant changing in the form that the information takes is confusing for children and it happens that they perform poorly in a test purely because the form of the task was different to the form that they learned it in (by “form” I mean everything from the language and words that are used to the pictures and formatting on the page.)

CAPS provides more clarity as to what and how teachers are to teach. The department is also in the beginning phases of providing assessment tasks that complement the curriculum content and this has brought back some sanity in the system. Unfortunately teachers still waste a lot of their time choosing between sources to teach from rather than spending that time finding supplementary teaching aids which will enrich the lesson. The biggest problem though is that because the assessments come from a different source to the teaching materials, there is a lack of consistency, the result is that what is being assessed is not exactly the same as what is being taught.

Remediation

There was a particular line of reasoning which influenced departmental policy regarding remediation that has probably done more to hamstring teachers than any other policy. The reasoning goes that remedial schools are a bad idea because children who are only slightly behind their peers academically can so easily find themselves labelled as “special needs” children and lumped together with others who genuinely have learning disabilities. There was a fear that teachers shirked their responsibilities towards children who needed more of their attention by labelling them as remedial school candidates. In order to combat this problem a strategy was employed which tried to include as many children as possible into mainstream education. Traditional remedial schools were drastically reduced in number and teachers are now directed to plan their lessons according to the principal of “inclusive education”.

Much has been said on the topic of class sizes in South African schools but, as a teacher, my experience has been that most teachers can successfully adapt their teaching method to accommodate bigger class sizes. What a teacher cannot do is effectively teach a big class and accommodate students requiring serious remedial attention. Even one student with a learning disability can take up half of a teacher’s total teaching time. Now in a big class where individualized attention is already a scarce commodity, this amount of attention is not feasible. One of two things happen as a result of this, either the rest of the class is neglected and the teaching pace is slowed down dramatically or those children with special needs are completely ignored and left to fend for themselves. Children with special needs often become the ones who disrupt the class because they act out of boredom or try to grab attention and so they disadvantage the rest of the class by changing the learning environment in these ways too.

So what began as a strategy to protect and include children who struggle academically in the end has had a disastrous effect on them as well as the rest of education. These children needing extra support easily become targets of teachers’ frustration and this only exacerbates their lack of confidence and self-belief. Progression requirements were modified to accommodate these learners so that they are automatically progressed if they have already failed once in a phase. This is why we have children going into high schools who cannot yet read or write or do even basic mathematical calculations. Mainstream schools are ill-equipped in every way to support children with special needs but are subjected to scrutiny every year and required to produce “evidence of classroom support”. It is always the most heart-sore time of the year for me when we send off our HOD’s with our list of students who need to repeat the grade to the department for “validation” only to have them return with the mournful news that the department has overturned our decisions and pushed students over to the next year who we know very well are never going to cope.

Labour

It has been my experience that the teaching profession brings out the very best and the very worst in people. There are many unsung heroes in our countries schools, people who have dedicated themselves to educating children not simply for the sake of a salary but for the good of others. They work longer and harder than what they are paid for. They absorb the pressure and shrug off the unrealistic expectations of the system and choose to focus on the important things which really make the difference in the children’s lives, sometimes at the cost of their reputation at the department. They choose to prioritize the well-being of the children above all the other pressures. Then there are others who go into teaching because it seemed to be a viable opportunity for good employment. When they are overwhelmed at the task of performing miracles term after term they resort to window dressing and cutting corners. These teachers refuse to give more than the bare minimum and when they are pressed beyond that they exploit the system or resort to union action.

Teaching in South Africa is an extremely stressful job and in some schools it can be dangerous as well. This is very unfortunate because they work with kids and kids are very impressionable at school going age. The words, the actions and the affections of their teachers have the potential to make them or break them as they come into adulthood. I have seen several young boys escape the clutches of gangsterism and crime because of the good influence of a teacher. I have also seen children give up on themselves and on their future because they felt they could no longer meet the expectations that teachers and education put on them.

I have seen teachers rise above the challenges in our system and attain remarkable results and in some cases, turned whole schools around. I have also seen teachers crack under the pressure and take many months or years seeking professional health care, some of whom never fully recover.

Conclusions

All things considered I believe that there is not a lot wrong with our system of education. There is enough money in education to make the other sectors blush which must surely mean that whatever obstacles there are cannot be insurmountable. Our curriculum needs further refinement but in the same direction it has already been heading – the department must produce teaching materials which are seamlessly integrated with assessment and remediation materials and alleviate the unnecessary burden from teachers who are spending countless hours innovating and re-producing teaching and assessment materials which deal with the same teaching content year after year! We need to bring back remedial schools and direct children with special needs to places where the facilities and the teachers have been appropriately equipped to teach them. We cannot continue to have a system of progression which winks at children with grades which do not meet clear pass requirements for the sake of moving children through the system. I believe that our system of education should operate according to the same system as the rest of the free market – that of reward and consequence. Perhaps more importantly than that, teachers need to be relieved of the unbearable expectation that is placed on them to perform miracles term after term. I used to joke with my principal that faith and teaching go hand in hand, but in the end I got so familiar with mixing faith and work that he lost me to full time church ministry!