SA education system not ready for a big jump in pass mark

Mmusi Maimane of Build One SA has made the 30% pass rate his thing just like Gayton McKenzie of the Patriotic Alliance has seized on illegal immigrants to gain political attention.

It’s what politicians do when they try to find some kind of traction with a weary public.

It is a goal I have long shared, that we need to dispense with this ridiculously low pass mark which in a number of subjects, apart from the home language, can still give you a matric (national senior certificate) certificate.

It is simply disgraceful that a student can pass a mathematics or geography exam without having demonstrated competence in 70% of the subject matter.

It is good politics and good education to seize on the 30% problem but what Maimane is not telling you is that this is almost impossible to do in a broken school system.

Having re-entered a high school this year as a turnaround specialist and part-time teacher, I can assure you that if we raised the overall pass mark to 50%, as in universities, we would easily double the pass mark.

The new minister of basic education might be young and inexperienced but somebody must have whispered in her ear that this very DA-ish of problems would catapult her into unemployment in no time.

That is because the system is not ready for such a radical move.

To put this in fancy terms, you cannot change an assessment standard as an output measure without changing the input measures that make up the overall education standards in a school.

In fact, I have seen first-hand how hard teachers work and principals scheme to get as many of their matriculants as possible over the 30% mark.

That level of pass is not only good for the individual student, it is also vital for the overall pass percentage of the school and therefore their public reputation.

So what is to be done? First, increase the standard by 5% every year so that the school system can gradually adjust to the new assessment standard.

For example, make the pass mark for all subjects 35% in 2025 and then 40% in 2026 until we reach the 50% ideal passing standard in 2028.

We know from research and experience that systems have the remarkable capacity to adjust to new performance (output) standards.

None of this will matter, though, if we do not change the input standards on which those outcomes depend.

Let me take a simple example from current work. We know that at many schools teacher absenteeism has become so chronic that it could lose more than 400 hours of instructional time in a single month of education.

Think about this calamitous calculation for a moment: if you calculate the number of teachers absent every single day and multiply that by the number of periods they teach per day and the average duration of each period, those of the kinds of losses in teaching time that dysfunctional schools face.

Now, if more than 90% of the department’s budget goes into teacher salaries, it follows that the most important leverage available for change is the consistent presence of a competent teacher in every classroom in every subject.

It is as simple and as complex as that. If this problem of chronic teacher absenteeism is not addressed, wave goodbye to the ideal of a 40 or 50%  pass mark as some political leaders would want us to attain.

A couple of “by the way” comments. One, this reality is what further fuels inequality in educational outcomes because a regularly absent teacher that tries this stunt in a former white school would be on the streets in no time.

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