OPINION | The unintended consequences of prioritising matric in SA

Considering high dropout rates among the school-going youth, getting to grade 12 is a significant step in SA.

Better yet, the latest unemployment figures by Statistics SA show that one’s employment prospects improve with education attainment. However, this does not justify the neglect of the lower grades by many public schools in the name of good grade 12 results.

You ask any secondary school teacher which grade on their timetable they would never miss, without a blink of an eye, it would be grade 12. Simply put, it means a significant number of pupils move up the grades devoid of fundamental cognitive skills that they will need in the later years of their schooling careers.

Then, it should be less surprising that we have one of the worst numeracy and literacy achievement scores at primary level, as research by Brahm Fleisch and other colleagues has clearly shown.

How did we get here? The adoption of high stakes testing and political interference have meant teachers are rewarded or punished based on their grade 12 results.

This is the same reason many teachers do everything they can to teach grade 12 because they are targeting promotions — with a teacher’s grade 12 performance profile serving as a significant yardstick — and the appointments for marking of mid-year and end-of-the-year exam scripts.

To add salt to the wound, most schools have resorted to questionable strategies such as encouraging at-risk pupils to drop notoriously difficult subjects and dump them for easier ones to boost their pass rates.

To unsuspecting parents, this seems legit until a child is stuck with an NSC that universities and other agencies don’t recognise, while schools brag about 100% pass rates.

For the sake of sanity, our teaching no longer prepares pupils for deep learning that encourages critical and innovative thinking but more about what is likely to appear in standardised tests.

To get pupils “ready”, schools schedule marathon afterschool and weekend classes, often to the detriment of teachers’ and pupils’ health. We don’t even give pupils sufficient rest time and room for self-directed learning as all we do is teach and assess.

Notwithstanding the multiplicity of other contributory factors, it is unsurprising then that research by Branson and Whitelaw shows alarming rates of university dropout rates because some of these students cannot cope with the intellectual rigours of tertiary education which could be caused by their historical overreliance on teachers.

As schools, we resort to such strategies to save our own skins though. Perhaps it only happens in the Free State, but most teachers who attend accountability sessions always bemoan the dehumanising nature of those sessions with the education officials.

This shaming does not help but worsens things as it leaves us frustrated and demoralised. While the role of teachers in the pupil achievement scores is critical, parents’ interventions are just as important, and we need to find constructive channels through which they can also account.

The ultimate prize is the announcement of “matric” results when different education MECs across the nine provinces lock horns with each other to brag about who has claimed the top spot in the country.

To onlookers, it seems that very few teachers care what in real terms those results mean. Put differently, it hardly matters to them that most of the pupils exit basic education lacking important contemporary skills necessary to compete in the global economy.

As teachers, we should derive the greatest satisfaction from the knowledge that our actions impact real lives. Not even political pressures should distract us from this pursuit.