tion>
The Toxic Mix blurb
“. . . international tests suggest that South African schools are among the world’s worst . . .”
Education in South Africa is a national disaster. Respected educationist Graeme Bloch faces the crisis head-on in this account of the toxic mix of factors responsible for our failed schools. He takes government to task for its role and analyses what has gone wrong with teachers and their support systems.
But Bloch also holds up some shining examples of schools that are getting it right through commitment and good leadership. He not only identifies the problems but clearly suggests how to fix these. The Toxic Mix is a powerful call to action.
(The book) speaks to an issue at the core of South Africa’s tragic failure to transform the inherited education system into one that provides the sure and tested route out of poverty.
– Dr Mamphela Ramphele
The Toxic Mix will make a lot of sense to ordinary South Africans struggling to understand why a nation that spends more (as a percentage of GDP) on school education than any other African state, has the worst results to show for such investment.
– Prof Jonathan Jansen
About the author
Graeme Bloch is an education policy analyst at the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). He taught in the education faculty at the University of the Western Cape and was project manager for youth development at the Joint Education Trust.
He is a graduate of the University of Cape Town where he specialised in economic history. He is a member of the UCT Council, serves as director on the Lafarge Education Trust and is a judge in the Impumelelo Innovation Awards.
Bloch has worked as head of Social Development in the Department of Welfare, and as Director of Social Development in the Joburg Metro. Before 1994, he was executive member of the National Education Crisis Committee (NECC) as well as the United Democratic Front (UDF). For his involvement in the democratic movement he was detained and arrested numerous times, and he was banned from 1976–81.
He has published a number of books and articles about education.
Contents
Author’s note
List of abbreviations
1. Facing up to the crisis
2. Scars from the past
3. What is wrong in our schools?
4. The toxic mix: who is to blame?
5. Schools getting it right
6. A map for the future
7. The right mix
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Author’s note
We could fill this book with facts and figures. There are plenty to highlight the South African education system’s inadequacies. These figures are often included in international comparisons, whether under acronyms like PIRLS or TIMMS or SACMEQ, or by any of the Grade 3 or 6 systemic evaluations for literacy, numeracy and science that the education department has instituted – all of which show that South African children are very far from achieving their full potential.
There are plenty of tables and figures that constitute the evidence on which this book is based. There are details of pass rates, numbers in school, numbers matriculating, teacher training graphs, and so on. Often the evidence is not complete, it is worth saying. There are many statistical gaps in information, and there is no point in hiding this or pretending that we know it all.
Despite these gaps, taken together, using different kinds of angles to confirm the findings, and drawing also on the experience of those in the field, it is still possible to draw quite clear conclusions about why our schools are failing.
There is much qualitative evidence, too, which means that many angles are possible and different stories can be told. There are often both negatives and positives, problems solved and new problems and challenges created or discovered. Stories need to be told, such as of the fantastic amalgamation of fourteen different apartheid education departments into one national department with provincial counterparts. There is the complex story of the reallocation of spend, from richer to poorer schools and between provinces, to begin to redress historical backlogs and inequalities. There is the policy emphasis on fixing the poorer township and rural schools.
We can drill down to specific policies such as the institution of quintiles, or breaking schools down into five groups, based on (surmised) wealth categories of various schools and what this has meant. Fee-free schooling, or maintaining schools that may charge fees, are not simple and one-dimensional choices without consequences and contradictions. For many of the figures, it is up to a point a case of which ‘facts’ you choose, how you arrange them, and how you decide to tell the story of education. Yet all the stories in these pages attest to the single fact that the vast majority of South African schools are underperforming abysmally.
What follows will rest on sound academic analysis, research and information. It is not my intention to present this in a boring or repetitive way. It is certainly not my intention to be ‘academic’ in the way that many people unfortunately understand this – up in the air, tendentious, always quoting some authority. I am not trying to prove an academic point or make a controversial point among researchers. Rather, I want to use research and the best of academia to make some clear policy propositions. Conclusions must be based on good information and well-analysed data and evidence.
It is thus my job as author to explore the academic literature and to make sure that this book reflects the latest findings and research. On the one hand, then, I am very conscious of the need to have evidence, facts and figures, and a clear analysis on which to rest the credibility and integrity of the book. On the other hand, it is the book’s job to sift through the drama and the debate so that the reader may be presented with clear choices and can clearly decide. Academic research must help us cut through complexity as well as help us confront the unpalatable truths.
While I have read quite widely, there is also a small and particular number of texts on which this book will lean heavily. These texts are partly useful precisely because they themselves summarise many of the debates and the state of consensus in the education field.
The first much-used book will be the UNESCO Education for All publication. Secondly, I will draw on a book that I was involved in editing recently. If I say so myself, it is really the only text that puts together concisely and clearly the recent experience of South African education change and education financing choices. Investment Choices for South African Education draws on both international experience and the post-apartheid period to give a system-wide analysis of investment options and expenditure choices in education. It provides some of the more up-to-date analysis of problems in education post-apartheid. It points directly to some of the critical reasons for the identified failings.
In the same year that this book came out, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also published a major Reviews of National Policies for Education in South Africa that summarises much of the
