Guest Blogger: Joan Vaughan
AKA: Rockstar
Joan Vaughan
If you’re from the South, odds are about 50/50 you’ve been on a mission trip.
Do you remember? In order to raise the costs, you hounded the church people for donations, hit up all your fond uncles, and washed cars. Then off you went, full of excitement and energy, thrilled to be impacting the lives of those less fortunate with your service.
You returned an entirely different person; your perspective, your giving, your heart irrevocably altered. The biggest change that trip effected was in you.
In early 2014, my husband, Peter, and I landed in Cape Town with the express purpose of joining a non-profit organization working to improve education in the informal settlements for which South Africa is so infamous. (Picture a cobbled-together city of 1.25 million largely unemployed people in corrugated- tin dirt-floor huts with no running water or plumbing. The one where we worked is called Khayelitsha; you’re probably more familiar with the settlement outside of Johannesburg named Soweto.)
As a consultant working with low-performing schools, I figured I was familiar with just about all the ways educational systems can fail the neediest students despite the best efforts of hugely talented and dedicated teachers and administrators. Oh, how wrong I was!
The problems in these settlements almost defy description. Of course, there are the familiar ones we face in the States; generational poverty, second language learners, parental illiteracy, despondency, drug-addiction, violence…but then there are the uniquely post-apartheid African additions; 13 separate languages and a governmental guarantee of instruction in that tongue, inter-tribal conflict, racial unrest and distrust, massive unemployment, severe lack of qualified teachers, gross government corruption, and hugely dysfunctional and disruptive teacher unions. The result is abysmal for education; the World Economic Forum ranks South Africa’s quality of education 146th of 148 reporting countries, and 148th , or dead last, in math and science performance.
My assignment was to visit schools in the informal settlements in order to interview principals and determine if they had the drive and potential to be candidates for our mentorship program. Peter and I would check the police reports in the morning to be sure no violence had occurred on our route; if there had been, we politely rescheduled. It took us a week to get to one school, as the taxi drivers were waylaying buses by throwing burning tires on the highway. They’d stop the traffic, pull the drivers out of the buses, and beat them up; an ongoing turf war of some ferocity. Most of the principals I interviewed had absolutely no training; they had full teaching loads, no resources, and were dying under a mountain of paperwork and strictures designed to improve performance. On each visit, we’d tour the school, spending as much time as the unions would let us in the classrooms, many of which had three kids sharing a desk. At the front, sitting on the mat doing absolutely nothing, might be another twenty or thirty students. Their teacher hadn’t shown up that day; there was no money for a sub, or plans left by the absent teacher, so they were split up among the other classes to spend their day sitting doing nothing, without even a book. The teachers seemed surprised I was appalled; it’s simply the norm. Teacher absenteeism is epidemic; even when they’re there, they may or may not go to class, and may or may not teach while in the class. South African educators estimate children are actually taught only 40% of the time they’re at school.
And the quality of teaching? Re-teaching? Individualizing? Reviewing? Planning? Remediating? Don’t even go there. I can’t tell you how many classes I visited where the teacher read the answers which the children dutifully copied…and that was the lesson! They were just filling in the blanks; the kids had no clue about the content. The district coordinators, who were gracious enough to talk with me, ruefully admitted that most teachers could barely pass the end-of-year exams for the grades they taught, to say nothing about knowing teaching methodology.
So it was incredibly rewarding when we did find a principal who was desperate for the help of our organization, committed to doing everything possible to help his/her students and community, and thrilled to have the support and resources we could offer. For those chosen, we offered a year-long partnership with business people, as well as training on leadership and management. The difference made to some of these schools by pairing business partners and under-resourced schools was nothing short of miraculous; like in the starfish story, we could, and did, make a difference to a few.
I would be exaggerating if I told you there were no decent schools. 20% of the schools in SA are deemed to be performing satisfactorily, while 80% are unsatisfactory. The high performers, however, are mostly private, so mask the frightening truth. Of the approximately 1,000,000 children who enter R1 yearly, only 200,000 will graduate grade 12, dumping 800,000 functionally illiterate, frustrated young people into the workforce each year. Of those who do graduate, only 20% qualify for university entrance, and 50% of those drop out the first year because of poor preparation for university disciplines. (Statistics taken from “How to Fix South Africa’s Schools” by Jonathan Jansen.) It’s a pretty grim forecast for the country whose current president has a fourth grade education and behaves accordingly.
I would be remiss, too, if I didn’t tell you I’d met some wonderful, dedicated, talented teachers. But, sadly, they were the exception rather than the rule. I met far more who hid behind the big stick wielded by the teachers unions and who did the bare minimum. As someone proud to call myself a teacher, it was a shock.