BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL MODEL WITHIN THE EDUCATION FRAMEWORK

Excerpts from a Colloquium Paper by Dr Mamphela Ramphele

We stand at a critical moment as a nation yearning to realise our potential as a non-racial democratic and prosperous society. Education is the key to the realisation of that potential. We need to search together to define and clarify systemic solutions, clear strategies and new legislative constructs that will help to: address the complications of the existing systems; create new hope; develop new plans of action; define new vital directions; and stimulate social entrepreneurship. It is clear to all who live and read in this country that we need to do things differently.

Current worldwide trends in education reflect that the achievement of high educational standards is often made possible as a consequence of providing greater autonomy for schools and the managers of schools. What is more important is that statistical and anecdotal evidence indicates that there is a real pattern of success emerging from the countries in which the trend toward educational innovation is particularly in evidence.

Hard Realities

From here on we need to avoid looking away from the ugly truth that glares unrelentingly at us! We are often too afraid to acknowledge failure or lack of knowledge to tackle failing systems, because we fear being labelled intellectually inferior. We need to refuse to be trapped by the racist conflation of lack of knowledge by black people denied opportunities, with intellectual inferiority.

The multi-generational impact of Bantu Education is devastating and is likely to persist unless confronted boldly. In this ugly but real context we need to explore and create parallel strategies and innovative interventions to create nodes of excellence that will model reform in action. We need to create a national discourse around educational issues – we need the media to support this directly and actively.

A Fresh Start

To begin with we need to create and drive a social movement that will sharpen focus and create real accountability at all levels. This movement needs to be built around creative models and frameworks for new teacher training and development; new levels of accountability in education and the creation of new ownership of success and failures of schools by parents and communities. We need to encourage all citizens to own their responsibility to the children of this country and to hold educators, officials and department officials accountable.

We need to show some dramatic examples of transformation and sustainable success.

We need to create partnerships within the global village to ensure that successful models of intervention from other countries can be shared and implemented. One of these may be to partner with organisations such as Teach with Africa and Teach for All – spreading the success of the Teach For America model that has created a huge influx of young graduates to teach in a complicated educational landscape.

Class representatives at Inanda proudly hold up their award for class discipline. Looking on is Headmistress Judy Tate.

The Historic Schools Restoration Project provides us with another opportunity for breaking the repetitive cycles of educational failure currently embedded in our country. The time has never been better for commitment to new plans of action but at the same time it remains clear that we are again at risk of simply working with the ‘familiar’ and in the end producing ‘more of the same’.

We need to tap into the management and strategic planning models available within the corporate world of our country. We need to draw business leaders into solution-seeking processes. This requires new energy and a new alignment of purpose and strategy across the educational and corporate sectors. There are many people willing to commit to such a process. We must engage experts in the hard work of understanding the causes and effects that poison education processes.

We believe that one of the triggers must come through legislative change.

Legislative Change

We have proposed to the ministry of education that consideration be given to expanding the two-tier categorisation of schools [public and independent] by creating a new category of schools. This will be for specially-focused schools assisted financially by the state – the costs calculated for a student in the appropriate phase at a public school would be paid to the state-assisted school on a per capita basis [as the current subsidy is calculated and paid]. The schools would be granted the autonomy accorded to independent schools for as long as they continued to produce positive results in terms of their agreed focus defined initially by all stakeholders within the school community.

The needs for innovation and development of strategies that break from our colonial past are vital. Such innovation is best managed within small schools that are willing to be entrepreneurial in their thinking and accountable using measurable outcomes agreed upon by the relevant stakeholders including the state.

International trends indicate real success in socio-economically marginalised communities by the creation of niche-access small schools with a clearly defined and publicly stated focus or charter. For example, the 66 KIPP Schools in 19 US states, serving over 16 000 students, are proving that demography does not define destiny. Some 80% of KIPP students are low income and 90% are African American or Latino. More than 80% of KIPP alumni have gone on to success at US colleges.

Many schools [new and old] are trapped in terms of determining a defined way forward and creating higher expectations within their school communities – such schools could be liberated to move forward with new levels of energy and accountability. Application for such state-assisted status would need to be according to strict criteria relating to the stated focus and ensuring that the schools guarantee access to young people who are denied opportunity by their socioeconomic reality.

It is an irony that historically advantaged institutions such as the Model C schools continue to enjoy the autonomy and teacher salary funding that ensures separate streams of income to create near parallel independent school advantages. This is allowed to be true while any new initiative to create an academy, college or special niche-access school environment for socio-economically disadvantaged students must declare itself an independent school and at best receive a limited state subsidy.

A look into the educational history in South Africa shows that the church schools developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s created environments conducive to real learning and leadership development. From these schools, such as Healdtown, Tiger Kloof, Adams College, St Mathews, Inanda Seminary and many more, emerged independent thinkers and strong leaders. These schools were neither independent nor state schools – they were state-assisted.

Benefits of State-Assisted Schools

With the re-creation of such an integrated system the state could share ownership of the positive results and be part of the growing successes of these schools. The growth and development of these institutions could then be supported by income streams from corporate social investment budgets and international funders wishing to be in harmony with the state’s identified needs and resultant policies. This could unlock previously unexplored spending capacities.

Through such a model the government would be ready to adapt to evolving global needs and shifts – whether they be ecological, entrepreneurship or science and technology.

There are many other possible benefits to the nation from a third tier of state-assisted schools:

• The creation of the third tier will help to build a social entrepreneurship movement. This will encourage professionals from all sectors to join the educational justice movement bringing together new energy, ideas, skills and mindsets.
• The creation of this assisted tier will release creativity allowing skilled leaders to take risks and try new tactics and methodologies in education. Greater school autonomy permits school leaders to experiment and demonstrate results with emerging alternatives.
• The third tier creation will encourage innovation. South Africa’s inequitable education system leads to instability. It leaves the majority of students ill-prepared for professional employment in a culture where the compensation of knowledge workers grossly outweighs that of service workers. New ideas and experimentation are needed to find out what works in each unique educational landscape in South Africa.
• Innovation in education provides the opportunity to collect data and observe the results of alternative:
  • school hours
  • school management systems
  • student identification and selection models
  • teacher compensation structures
  • teacher training methodologies
  • teacher recruiting and hiring frameworks
  • student-to-teacher ratios
  • academic and non-academic instruction models
  • whole-person development strategies
  • student incentives and disciplinary models
  • schedule structures such as class period time and self-contained classes
  • school settings.
• The third tier creation will invite private money into education exciting private donors who are looking for opportunities to:
  • contribute to a more stable South Africa
  • build their base of future clients and employees
  • boost their brand image, and
  • redistribute some of the vast earnings accumulating in the corporate sector in order to satisfy the organisational conscience.
• The creation of the third tier introduces financial incentives for exemplary school performance in the form of private donations. When private funds are encouraged to flow into schools, educational institutions have a strong incentive to track and produce impressive results. This reveals effective strategies and produces a strong drive to demonstrate measurable gains.

Learning from the Global Village

We know that the wisdom of all of us is greater than the wisdom of any of us, so let’s look at the patterns emerging in our increasingly connected world. There are many examples of successful new ‘third-tier’ equivalent models of education from a wide range of countries and encompassing a range of developmental and economic frameworks.

In South America, the Fundación Paraguaya is a non-profit social enterprise which develops innovative solutions to poverty and unemployment and disseminates them worldwide. Fundación Paraguaya’s response is: “Education at Pays For Itself ”. It has developed and proven an innovative model of agro-entrepreneurial education and commits to replicating it at least 50 more times in developing countries over the next ten years.

This innovative approach to education was developed by the Fundación Paraguaya at its agricultural high school for the children of the rural poor. In 2002, the Fundación took over responsibility for the then-bankrupt school and, with the support of the Skoll and Avina Foundations, introduced a new curriculum that integrates traditional high school subjects with the running of small-scale, on-campus agricultural enterprises.

These school-based enterprises serve as a platform for students to develop entrepreneurial skills and business acumen so that when they graduate from high school, they are ready to succeed as self-employed entrepreneurs. ese same skills are also highly valued by employers, and because students receive nationally recognised qualifications, the door to higher education remains open to them if they choose.

A student demonstrates a science experiment to visitors at Tiger Kloof.

Because school enterprises sell real products to real customers, they offer a feedback mechanism to ensure that the education provided is relevant and of high quality. Moreover, teachers must constantly update their practices to keep pace with the market, which means that students leave with the skills in demand today. Operating on the basis of a solid business plan, they have shown that at the end of five years of operation, these enterprises are able to generate sufficient income to cover all of the school’s operating costs. Greater school resources mean better facilities and better paid and more motivated teachers. The end result is consistently higher quality education.

What makes this initiative so important is that it offers a proven methodology for overcoming the key problems that have plagued education for poor people in developing countries for so long:

• the need for accessible and relevant education for poor people
• the need for high quality education that enables students to contribute to the economic and social development of their communities and their countries
• the need for financially sustainable schools
• the need for solutions that can be replicated relatively inexpensively on a massive scale around the globe.

In developing replicable solutions to long-standing social problems, the toughest challenge is to make the approach work the first time; thereafter, the challenge is to tailor the model to similar, but different, circumstances. They have met this first challenge: their graduates are on their way to becoming economically successful, and their agricultural school is 100% financially self-sufficient. They are now taking up the second challenge to help other schools in India, Africa, and Latin America to replicate the approach. They will identify partners with whom they can replicate their proven educational approach on a more massive scale and reach some of the neediest youth in the rest of the world. South Africa needs to be part of this initiative.

The beauty of this particular model as it could apply to the South African context is that it demonstrates how to integrate sustainability values and decision-making criteria into the movement towards social justice through education. As the injustices of the past are addressed, the model begins to address the hidden injustices of a ‘schools-as-usual’ future.

Paraguay serves as an example of a country enabling innovative educational and social transformation. This example of significant and rapid educational reform benefiting particularly economically marginalised communities highlights the real and potential consequences of innovative legislative change. In many other countries, such models are emerging in parallel with public school reform processes. In Australia more than 30% of children now attend church-based schools based on similar reform initiatives. In India the creation of ‘hub and spoke’ schools, linking state and independent schools directly, also points to the freedom to risk and innovate that comes with legislative freedom. This encourages the practice of social entrepreneurship within education.

The Historic School Restoration Project specifically requires the autonomy with responsibility created in the examples cited. In South Africa a small echelon of social entrepreneurship educational initiatives and unusual academy/college-like models are emerging spontaneously. Innovative autonomous schools such as Sekolo sa Berogo in Gauteng and the three LEAP Science and Maths Schools in Langa, Guguletu/Crossroads and Alexandra townships all strive to create real opportunity for children marginalised by apartheid history and present socio-economic reality. These schools operate within different funding frameworks each with a track record of relative success. All would be more effectively sustainable and scalable within the third tier. These schools have demonstrated the potential benefit that can come when innovation and autonomy are combined with specific stated and narrowly focused educational objectives.

What Process is Envisaged?

This proposed legislative change should not allow the creation of profit-driven initiatives to be applied to the tier of independent schooling. The HSRP team shares a strong conviction that granting autonomy to schools is an important part of enabling the goals of excellence to be achieved.

The HSRP team recognises that the selection of a specific niche or focus area would in itself require a planned process and should be followed by a specific declaration of intent against which the achievement of excellence could then be focused and measured. e development of specific niche-focused schools will ensure that an appropriate and cost-effective service mix can be developed and that a commitment to continuous improvement could then become part of the HSRP’s striving for quality.

In the context of the HSRP, excellence means a deep-seated commitment to a transformational process for learners and educators alike that focuses on self-development and the discovery and activation of personal capacity. This will mean that the stated curriculum goals and predetermined focus of each school can be attained to the fullest extent possible, consistent with the best efforts of all the stakeholders of each school.

The achievement of academic excellence, cultural excellence and social cohesion in the context of South Africa depends heavily on the foundations laid at the secondary school level. New models of such achievement are vital to provide the ‘yeast’ to stimulate growth and development within the whole education sector.

Model-building within the education framework requires partnerships across a wide front. The creation of the third tier of state-assisted schools will make a significant impact on the face of education in South Africa. The need for understanding this opportunity with its associated responsibility is clear. More importantly, in the field of education, the need for real principled action governed by integrity has never been greater in our history.