Abstract
This closing chapter offers both a generative synthesis (what do we now know?) as well as a catalytic synthesis (what is to be done?) of the research contributions to this book on education and inequality in South Africa. The key findings confirm the entrenchment of inequalities in South African schools by race and class despite successive waves of policy reform in pursuit of educational equity. Neither of the two main categories of intervention, curriculum coverage and teacher competence, seem to have had any marked effects on closing the gap in learning outcomes between privileged and poor schools. The research presented in this book suggests that considered actions to redress inequality would require a combination of political, policy and planning instruments focused on building the foundations of education in the pre- and primary levels of schooling.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The two cases of pit-latrine drownings that received considerable media attention was that of five-year old Lumka Mketwa in Bizana (Eastern Cape) in 2018 and of five-year old Micheal Komape in Polokwane (Limpopo) in 2014.
- 2.
It is my view that a major shortcoming in edited books is the lack of a conceptual framing chapter at the beginning (impressing intellectual focus and coherence on the multi-authored contributions) and a generative knowledge chapter at the end (offering new knowledge on the central topic—in this case, inequality in education—that is garnered from the separate author chapters). This is what our book hopes to do differently as a contribution to research on educational inequality.
- 3.
It is worth remembering that redress as an instrument to resolve inequality was a founding rationale for educational change in South Africa.
- 4.
It is most unusual to cite a pre-doctoral study thesis as evidence in a research book but this is one of the most exceptional qualitative studies yet done on teacher unions in South Africa by a young student.
- 5.
Sample of reports on Equal Education’s activism from Cape Town in the Western Cape to King Williams Town in the Eastern Cape.
- 6.
Data drawn from the National Education Infrastructure Management System (Neims) of 2017.
- 7.
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), The Southern and Eastern Africa Consoritum for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) and The Progress in International Reading Literacy (PIRLS).
- 8.
In South Africa there are two main pathways towards achieving a university-based teacher qualification. One is through a four-year professional Bachelor of Education (BEd degree) offered in a Faculty or School of Education. Another path is through a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) which is a single year of pre-service teacher education after a first degree was attained with school subjects (e.g. Mathematics III in a BSc degree) in another Faculty (e.g. Science).
References
Ashley-Cooper, M., van Nieker, L., & Atmore, E. (2019). Early childhood development in South Africa: Inequality and opportunity. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality.
Barnes, T. (2006). Changing discourses and meanings of redress in South African higher education, 1994–2001. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 41(1–2), 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909606061751
Bell, D. (2016). The conflict for compromise: An analysis of South Africa’s post-Apartheid transition period. International Journal of Advanced Research, 4(7), 2285–2290. https://doi.org/10.21474/ijar01/1123
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Haymarket Books.
Branson, N., Garlick, J., Lam, D., & Leibbrandt, M. (2012). Education and inequality: The South African case. Southern African Labour and Development Unit (SALDRU), University of Cape Town (Working Paper Series 75).
Cappy, C. L. (2016). Shifting the future? Teachers as agents of social change in South African secondary schools. Education as Change, 20(3), 119–140. https://doi.org/10.17159/1947-9417/2016/1314
Carter, P. L., & Reardon, S. F. (2014). Inequality matters. William T Grant Foundation Paper. New York: William T Grant Foundation.
Christie, P. (1998). Schools as (dis) Organisations: The ‘breakdown of the culture of learning and teaching’ in south African schools. Cambridge Journal of Education, 28(3).
Coleman, J. S. (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity, Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, p 325. Quoted in Douglas B Downey and Dennis J Condron (2016) Fifty years since the Coleman report: Rethinking the relationship between schools and inequality. Sociology of Education, 89(3), 207–220.
Crouch, L., & Mabogoane, T. (1998). When the residuals matter more than the coefficients: An educational perspective. Journal for Studies in Economic and Econometrics, 22, 1–14.
Department of Education. (2016). Report of the Ministerial Task Team appointed by Minster Angie Motshekga to investigate allegations into the selling of posts of educators by members of teachers unions and department officials in provincial education departments. Pretoria.
Duncan, J. (2016). Protest Nation: The right to protest in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Equal Education. (2016). Planning to fail: A report on equal education’s Eastern Cape school visits, Nov 2016. https://equaleducation.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/PLANNING-TO-FAIL-SUMMARY-OF-FINDINGS.pdf
Fiske, E. B., & Ladd, H. F. (2004). Elusive equity: Education reform in post-apartheid South Africa. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Fleisch, B. (2018). Education triple Cocktail: System-wide education reform in South Africa. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Groundup. (2017). Failure in eastern cape education, 28 April.
Hendricks, A., & Washinyira, T. (2016). High school students protest over safety and sanitation. Groundup, 21 Oct 2016 https://www.groundup.org.za/article/high-school-students-protest-over-safety-and-sanitation/
Hoadley, U. (2012). What do we know about teaching and learning in South African primary schools? Education as Change, 16(2), 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/16823206.2012.745725
Hoadley, U. (2017). Pedagogy in poverty: Lessons from twenty years of curriculum reform in South Africa. New York: Routledge.
Hobden, P., & Hobden, S. (2019). The quality, quantity and focus of individual learner written work contributing to inequality in primary schools. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality.
Howie, S., Van Staden, S., Tshele, M., Dowse, C., & Zimmerman, L. (2017). Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2016. South African Children’s Reading Literacy Achievement. Summary Report. Centre for Evaluation and Assessment, Pretoria.
Jansen, J. (2017). As by fire: The end of the South African University (1st ed.). Cape Town: NB Publishers.
Jansen, J. D. (2001). Image-ining teachers: Policy images and teacher identity in South African classrooms. South African Journal of Education, 21(4), 242–246.
Jansen, J. D., & Blank, M. (2014). How to fix South Africa’s schools: Lessons from schools that work (1st ed.). Johannesburg: Bookstorm.
Jansen, J. D., & Christie, P. (1999). Changing curriculum: Studies on outcomes-based education in South Africa. Cape Town/Johannesburg: Juta and Company Ltd.
Lam, D., Ardington, C., & Leibbrandt, M. (2011). Schooling as a lottery: Racial differences in school advancement in urban South Africa. Journal of Development Economics, 95(2), 121–136.
Matentjie, T. (2019). Race, class and inequality in education: Black parents in white-dominant schools after apartheid. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality.
Metcalfe, M., & Witten, A. (2019). Taking change to scale: Lessons from the Jika iMfundo campaign in KZN. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality.
Motala, S., & Carel, D. (2019). Educational funding and equity in South African schools. In N. Spaull & J. Jansen (Eds.), South African schooling: The enigma of inequality. New York: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_1
Muller, J., & Hoadley, U. (2019). Curriculum reform and learner performance: An obstinate paradox. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality.
Nelson, C., Chandra, A., & Miller, C. (2018). Can measures change the world? Stanford Social Innovation Review, 16, 1.
Noguera, P. (2017). Introduction to “racial inequality and education: Patterns and prospects for the future”. Educational Forum, 81(2), 129–135.
Oaks, J., et al. (2006). Learning power. Waynflete lectures delivered at College of St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford, 1961. New York: Teachers College Press.
Pattillo, K. (2012). Quiet corruption: Teachers unions and leadership in South African township schools. Ph.D. thesis, Weslyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
Reardon, S. F. (2011). The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations. In R. Murnane & G. Duncan (Eds.), Whither opportunity? Rising inequality and the uncertain life chances of low-income children (pp. 91–116). New York: SAGE Foundation Press.
Reddy, V., Juan, A., Isdale, K., & Fongwa, S. (2019). Mathematics achievement and achievement gaps: TIMSS 1995 to 2015. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality.
Samoff, J. (2018). Critical commentary on earlier draft of this chapter.
Schuh Moore, A., DeStefano, J., & Adelman, E. (2012). Opportunity to learn: A high impact strategy for improving educational outcomes in developing countries. Working Paper. USAID, EQUIP2.
Shalem, Y., & De Clercq, F. (2019). Teacher development and inequality in schools: Do we now have a theory of change? In N. Spaull & J. Jansen (Eds.), South African schooling: The enigma of inequality. New York: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_1
Shalem, Y., Steinberg, C., Koornhof, H., & De Clercq, F. (2016). The what and how in scripted lesson plans: The case of the Gauteng primary language and mathematics strategy. Journal of Education, 66, 13–36.
Spaull, N., & Pretorius, E. (2019). Still falling at the first hurdle: Examining early grade Reading in South Africa. In N. Spaull & J. Jansen (Eds.), South African schooling: The enigma of inequality. New York: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_1
Twala, C. (2014). The causes and socio-political impact of the service delivery protests to the South African citizenry: A real public discourse. Journal of Social Sciences, 39(2), 159–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/09718923.2014.11893279
Taylor, N. (2019). Teacher knowledge in South Africa. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality. In N. Spaull & J. Jansen (Eds.), South African schooling: The enigma of inequality. New York: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_1
Taylor, S. (2019). How can learning inequalities be reduced? Lessons learnt from experimental research in South Africa. In N. Spaull & J. Jansen (Eds.), South African schooling: The enigma of inequality. New York: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_1
Van der Berg, S., Spaull, N., Wills, G., Gustafsson, M., & Kotzé, J. (2016). Identifying binding constraints in education. Stellenbosch: Research on Socio-economic Policy. Available from: http://resep.sun.ac.za. Accessed May 2016.
Van der Berg, S., & Gustafsson, M. (2019). Educational outcomes in post-apartheid South Africa: Signs of Progress despite great inequality. In N. Spaull & J. Jansen (Eds.), South African schooling: The enigma of inequality. New York: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_1
Von Hippel, P., Workman, J., & Downey, D. B. (2017). Inequality in reading and math skills comes mainly from early childhood: A replication, and partial correction, of ‘Are Schools the Great Equalizer?’ SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3036094, Social Science Research Network, Rochester.
Wills, G. (2014). The effects of teacher strike activity on student learning in South African primary schools. Technical Report 01/2014, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
Witten, A., & Makole, K. (forthcoming). Mapping the pathways of systemic change in education in South Africa: A case study of the Programme to improve learning outcomes (PILO).
Zuze, T. L., & Beku, U. (2019). Gender inequalities in south African schools: New complexities. In South African schooling: The enigma of inequality.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jansen, J.D. (2019). Inequality in Education: What is to Be Done?. In: Spaull, N., Jansen, J. (eds) South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-18810-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-18811-5
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)