Don't fire Pandor, fire some teachers

Although in general I love her blogs, firing Naledi Pandor, as Charlene Smith suggests, is really not going to help the desperate state of South African schools. Firing teachers, however, might.

And there is precedent for it. Arkansas school children, in the early Eighties, tested far below the national average in the US for the basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills needed for a knowledge-based economy. Clinton, in his second term as governor, introduced the Quality Education Act, which did some of the things we repeat year after year we are going to do, like ensure smaller classes etc. More importantly, the law introduced testing for teachers.

Mora than 25 000 teachers, supervisors and aides took the tests, according to Martin Walker, in his biography of Clinton (The President They Deserve, Fourth Estate Publishers), and 10% failed. But they were entitled to take the tests again, and were also entitled to be retrained at state expense. The state had to put up sales tax to do it, but the neat trick was, Clinton refused any increases to teachers until they agreed to testing. Quid pro quo. Eventually, 1 315 teachers had to leave the system.

This peeved just about everyone who would normally support Clinton. The sales tax, a retrogressive tax that hurts the poor most, was objectionable to most social-justice advocates. The unions hated it. But ordinary people were sick and tired of their kids getting a ghetto education, and they went for it.

It’s the sort of thing only a newly elected politician fighting for every vote would try, especially because most of the teachers in the southern states who were poorest educated, and failed even with retraining, were black. He was accused of indirect racism. It should have killed him politically. Of course it didn’t. It was just too good an idea, and Slick Willy sold it for all he was worth.

Certainly, in South Africa, it would be the political equivalent of seppuku, the ritual suicide practised by Samurai warriors. Or would it? Aren’t we just sick of hearing bright hard working kids dropping out because they don’t get the support they need in schools? Can you stand putting another ad in the paper looking for a skilled employee, knowing you will get a hundred heartbreaking applications, misspelled, badly typed, or handwritten, young people clearly failed by the system that is supposed to educate them? Is there enough of a sense of “enough!”?

I can see the pitfalls. Anyone with half a brain can. The huge injustice of people systematically denied an education by apartheid being discarded as “not good enough’ now that the struggle is won may be too hard to bear. And how any of this helps without mother-tongue education is a bit of a mystery to me. But what if teachers were given another chance? An opportunity to get to college, or university? Not a weekend course, or training for a week, with a certificate at the end of it, but actual education over months and years? With financial incentives?

Maybe some people would end up teaching grade seven maths, and not grade twelve. And maybe some people would have to chuck it in and go and work somewhere else. It would be a huge undertaking, and an enormous political risk, and Trevor could forget the surplus he wants to build up. In fact, taxes might have to go up. But it is no alternative to wait it out, until somehow, the whole wretched system heals itself, and sustain all that damage, to all those kids, in every year that graduates.