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Policies need to look beyond affirmative action, to the role of quality education
South Africa’s poor continue to lag behind when it comes to education, employment opportunities and wages, despite official attempts to address historical discrimination and imbalances.
Recent research by the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University finds that the education system generally fails to produce outcomes to help eradicate inequalities.
Instead, schooling reinforces current patterns of poverty and privilege.
A backlog, from an early age
The research, conducted as part of a large project undertaken by the department’s Social Policy Research Group, highlights the importance of quality education in the improvement of poor children’s economic prospects.
It is therefore alarming that by the age of 8, children from the poorest 80% of households are already far behind the richest 20% in student performance. This disadvantage remains throughout their years of education and stays with them when they enter the labour market.
Reforms are not having an impact
There have been fundamental reforms to the administration and governance of education in South Africa, and considerable progress in redistributing public expenditure. Public spending on non-personnel costs for the poorest 20% of schools is roughly six times higher than expenditure on the richest 20% of schools.
Nevertheless, the majority of poor South African learners continue to under-perform in Maths, Reading and Science in terms of standards set by the curriculum.
They also fare poorly when measured against other African countries. Given that South Africa has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources, one would expect that South African students would perform at the top of the regional distribution. Unfortunately this is not the case. In a league table of student performance, South Africa ranks 10th out of the 15 Sub-Saharan African countries tested for Grade 6 student reading performance and 8th out of 15 for Grade 6 student maths performance. This means that South Africa is performing worse than Botswana, Zimbabwe or Swaziland, for example.
The challenges of being poor
School outcomes are highly unequal. For example, the poorest 80% of learners scored significantly lower than the richest 20% in Grade 6 Maths and reading tests.
Being a learner in a poor school represents a huge disadvantage, and black children are more likely to attend poor schools, with little opportunity to transfer into the more effective, wealthier part of the system.
A number of problems plague poor children from the outset. They face a lack of a stimulating learning environment at home, and they do not benefit from quality pre-schooling in sufficient numbers.
Once they enter the school system, they are more likely to attend schools characterised by low levels of discipline, weak management and a lack of highly qualified, experienced teachers. They generally don’t have sufficient access to textbooks, don’t get enough homework or opportunities for extended learning time at school and their teachers do not provide regular assessments and good feedback to help them make wise subject choices.
Labour market outcomes
A lack of educational attainment and quality schooling has a significant, negative impact on poor children’s employment and earnings potential.
In contrast, wealthier children are more likely to pass Matric with an exemption that allows them to enter tertiary education and compete for the best jobs.
The limited effectiveness of affirmative action
A large part of what we perceive to be labour market discrimination is actually caused by a lack of sufficient, quality education on the part of poor, black children. Affirmative action measures therefore do not tackle the root cause of the inequality problem.
Effective pro-poor policies should be targeted at those specific causes of under-performance in the poor parts of the education system,. Without such a focus, inequalities in education, employment opportunities and earnings are set to remain.
For more information or to request access to the original research papers, contact Ronelle Burger at RBURGER [at] sun.ac.za
