EDITORIAL: Matric: don’t believe Motshekga’s smoke and mirrors

So much has been said about South Africa’s matric results — ostensibly, an 80.4% pass rate — yet there’s a palpable sense that the books have been cooked here.

Last week, basic education minister Angie Motshekga crowed about the “value” of a matric certificate, saying that “for reasons best known to our critics, public schooling that serves over 12-million learners is often derided”.

She clearly isn’t paying attention. A 2019 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded that the country “still suffers from significant challenges in the quality of educational achievement by almost any international metric”.

For example, it pointed out that grade 9 pupils were second to last in a ranking of 39 countries by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement for mathematics, and last in science in 2015. 

“About half of South Africa’s students drop out of school before completing secondary education. Among the learners who write the end of high school examinations, about a quarter fail. Moreover, less than 5% of students who start primary school end up with a university qualification,” it said. 

Other studies underscore this. In the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), which measured literacy at a grade 4 level in 58 countries, South Africa came stone last. And in the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), South Africa scored third lowest of 64 countries in both maths and science.

This speaks to a growing dissonance between what the government says about our education system and what that system actually produces.

As University of Stellenbosch professor Jonathan Jansen put it: “The only problem with the ever-increasing matric results is that the international benchmarks tell the exact opposite about the performance of our school system.”

It’s evident, then, that matric results are becoming less meaningful as a gauge of whether we’re preparing children for a role in a future society. 

That IMF study found that “money is clearly not the main issue, since South Africa’s education budget is comparable to OECD countries as a percent of GDP and exceeds that of most peer Sub-Saharan African countries in per capita terms”.

Like so much else in South Africa, it’s not a lack of money that’s the problem; it’s a lack of proper management and oversight.

The IMF researchers say a large part of the problem is due to undercooked teachers with “insufficient subject knowledge”, though history, race, language, location and socioeconomic status all play a role.

It’s a point made by Baxolile Nodada, the DA’s spokesperson on basic education, who said this week that there were 1,575 unqualified and underqualified teachers in classrooms last year.

Nodada pointed to a Southern and East Africa education study, which revealed that South Africa lagged behind the rest of the continent. “South African teachers struggled to pass tests in the subjects they teach, with grade 6 teachers achieving results of less than 50% — 41% for mathematics, 37% for reading subjects,” he said.

Is it any wonder that when you factor in dropouts and failures to that 80.4% pass rate, it soon plunges to 54%? 

The real problem, the IMF points out, is that this low educational achievement “contributes to low productivity growth, and high levels of poverty, unemployment, and inequality”.

Motshekga has presided over this dilution of standards for 14 years, content to hit an artificial goal rather than ensure quality education to shift our productivity metrics. We’re only fooling ourselves.