JONATHAN JANSEN: It's time for teacher redistribution to fix our schools
'Such a not-so-radical act of teacher redistribution is not only good for pupils now; it is good for all of us in the future'
With a new government (some say, not-so-new) in place, it is time to deal with the single most important factor explaining the continued inequalities between our schools: the teacher. In one set of schools (about 20%) the teachers are highly qualified and better skilled in terms of both their content knowledge (knowledge of the subject) and their knowledge of teaching (how to effectively convey that knowledge to children). In many other South African schools, the research shows, teachers know less about the subject than the pupils in the more privileged part of the school system. In other words, we are struggling not only with inequalities of infrastructure – one set of schools has state-of-the-art digital facilities for learning and in more than 4,000 schools there are still open holes in which children relieve themselves and sometimes drown in the human faeces below them – we are also dealing with differences in teacher knowledge.This is reflected in the vastly different learning ...
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