As Africa Check discovered, the NSC results, which improved again, are not a reliable barometer of the quality of education in SA, writes Kate Wilkinson.
For the fifth year in a row, South Africa’s education authorities have announced dramatic improvements in the matric pass rate.
“(W)e are sending a strong message that basic education under the new administration has the capacity to improve the quality of education in South Africa,” Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga said this week as she made the announcement.
“(T)his is the best matric class since 1994,” president Jacob Zuma enthused. “We are… pleased to note this consistently upward trend in the matric results, with the pass rate going from 62.6 percent in 2008, dipping to 60.6 percent in 2009, only to rise to 67.8 percent in 2010, 70.2 percent in 2011 and 73.9 percent in 2012.” (Note that it hasn’t been entirely consistent. As Zuma himself pointed out, the pass rate fell by 2 percent in 2009.)
Others have been far less complimentary.
In a scathing opinion piece, Jonathan Jansen, the vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State and a prominent commentator on education, wrote that the country’s education system was a “massive fraud”.
Government “wrongly, but conveniently” used the matric results as “a barometer of the state of the school system”, when all other data “reveals we have been stagnating, or doing worse”, Jansen argued.
The DA has called on Motshekga to “institute a full-scale independent audit of the 2013 results”, citing concerns over the quality of the markers, the process of moderation and the high drop-out rate.
While conceding that there is “still a lot of work that needs to be done”, Motshekga remains adamant that education in South Africa is on the “right track”.
Addressing a business briefing yesterday, Motshekga said that the pass rate – which has improved from 60.9 percent in 2009 to 78.2 percent in 2013 – is “an indication that indeed the system is on the right track”.
She also claimed that “(t)here is overwhelming evidence that we are improving learner performance”.
But is the system really on the right path? And has the quality of education in South Africa improved along with the pass rate?
For starters, Motshekga’s claim that the increase in the pass rate “is an indication that indeed the system is on the right track” is contradicted by her own department.
The Department of Basic Education says on its website that “(c)ontrary to popular belief, the matric pass rate on its own is not a good measure of academic achievement in the schooling system, (and) nor was the pass rate ever designed for this”. Rather, the pass rate serves as a “measure of the opportunities open to our youths”.
It goes on: “Comparing pass rates in different years is, in fact, not like comparing apples to apples… Examinations like our matric are simply not designed to compare the performance of the schooling system across years. They are designed to test whether the individual learner qualifies for a certificate, based on the subjects the learner has chosen.”
The department suggests that “(i)f one wants to compare how well the system is doing, one should turn to testing systems like the international TIMSS and SACMEQ programmes, where South Africa has participated for some years”.
A further flaw in using the matric pass rate as a barometer of national performance is that thousands of school pupils drop out long before they reach their final year. The drop-out rate is not taken into account in the final pass rate.
For example, when the 2013 matric class started Grade 1 in 2002, there were 1 261 827 pupils. But by the time they sat the final exams, their numbers had fallen to 562 112.
Nicholas Spaull, a researcher at Stellenbosch University who focuses on primary education, says that “students are pushed through the system until Grade 10, and then schools realise that if they put these kids through, they are not going to pass Grade 12”.
“Getting low pass rates in matric is problematic for schools, so they weed out these students.”
The matric rate is thus bumped up, and gives no indication of how the 50 percent that fall by the wayside are doing. Jansen, in his opinion piece, called it a “culling process” that has left behind half a million people with little or no proper education.
Mary Metcalfe, former head of the University of the Witwatersrand School of Education and a former provincial government minister for education in Gauteng, echoes these concerns. “(The pass rate) doesn’t tell us about the large number of children who didn’t make matric, who didn’t pass Grade 10, who didn’t pass Grade 11, and who failed at Grade 12,” she said.
The drop-out rate has had a significant impact. A 2011 report revealed that “60 percent of youths are left with no qualification at all beyond the Grade 9 level”.
Also, whether as a result of school pressure or individual choice, pupils are increasingly taking easier subjects.
In 2010, 263 034 full-time pupils wrote maths. This decreased to 241 509 pupils in 2013. Conversely, numbers of full-time pupils writing maths literacy, the easier subject, increased from 280 836 in 2010 to 324 097 in 2013.
The Department of Basic Education acknowledges the impact this has on the final pass rate: “A key factor is the spread of learners across subjects. When this changes, the pass rate can change, even if performance in individual subjects remains the same. In particular, if learners move to easier subjects, more learners pass.”
The matric results also conceal the underperformance of the majority of pupils who write the exam. Strong performances in a minority of schools will mask the poor performance of the majority of schools that are judged as dysfunctional.
This skews the average, and does not present a true reflection of the mean for most pupils. This point was also highlighted in Jansen’s criticism of the matric results: “(I)f you removed the top 20 percent of schools – mainly former white, privileged schools – from the national averages, then a very dark picture emerges of a mainly black and poor school system performing far below what the combined results show,” he wrote.
The improvement in the matric pass rate is good news for those concerned, but it is not a sign that the “system is on the right track”, or that the quality of the education system is improving.
An Africa Check report looking at claims made about the 2012 matric results came to the same conclusions.
The matric results are not a good measure of academic achievement in the education system. As the department has acknowledged, they are not designed for yearly comparison, or to be a reflection of academic achievement in the education system. The good performance of a minority of schools can also skew the results, as can pupils electing to take easier subjects.
The results only account for about half of those who entered school together. South Africa’s high drop-out rate means that many young people will never get the chance to write their matric exams, let alone pass them.
* This article first appeared on the Africa Check website (www.africacheck.org). Africa Check is a non-profit organisation run from the Department of Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand. It promotes accuracy in public debate, testing claims made by public figures around the continent.
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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