Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Education report is weak and misleading the public
The Department of Basic Education has noted with disappointment the latest “research report” by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust on the future of education.
The Education Research Report of the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust (OMT), released in October 2023, focusses on a critical matter, the future of South Africa’s education system. It presents several proposals, utilising a desktop research methodology, well known for limitations of reliability, accuracy and relevance; and interviews from individuals termed ‘brilliant and excellent’. However, its diagnosis is in many respects inaccurate, or one-sided, which weakens its standing and the validity of its proposals.
Moreover, apart from consulting government’s National Development Plan (NDP), released in 2012, there was hardly any analysis of more recent government publications and plans. By not looking beyond the NDP, specifically at the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) documents, which enact and in some cases adapt the recommendations of the NDP, the OMT missed an opportunity to engage more with what government is doing. As a result, there is little engagement with the current thinking and activities of government. This renders the Report projections detached from the current context of activities in the DBE.
The weakness of this report, particularly with respect to diagnosis of the problem in the Basic Education Sector is the deliberate exclusion of the issue of language and how it impacts on opportunities for learning for both teachers and learners. It is curious that the Report recommends ‘more English instead of acknowledging the negative long-term effects on focusing on English-mainly in the system of both Basic and Higher Education. Research Reports that miss this important foundational element fall into the trap of apportioning blame to everything else, except to also issues of Language of Learning, Teaching and Assessment in both Basic and Higher Education. This report seems to have missed that already in 2022, the DBE had embarked on a plan to change the language landscape to create an enabling school environment for all children and redress the epistemic and identity issues acknowledged as having material effect on learning outcomes. Such a glaring omission in the Report in the pursuit of deficit stereotypes is misleading the nation and it is grossly misreading the DBEs drive to improve the system.
It is also curious why the report is released now when tangible milestones have been achieved and new national strategies for multilingual education and reading literacy are in place. Other than hankering on what appears to be a nostalgic for past deficit narratives, the DBE thus finds both the intent of the OMT report highly questionable.
It is the DBEs view that a comprehensive desktop review of the complex education system would ideally extend not just to government documents, but also to a critical view of teacher union policies, reviews of South Africa’s education system by global bodies such as the OECD, and how the media covers education.
The following response deals with the basic education section in the Report, given that this has been the core responsibility of the Department of Basic Education.
The following inaccuracies, or omissions, are worth noting:
1. Government has repeatedly argued, using reliable data from international testing programmes, that the quality of schooling has been improving, at a rate that is steep compared to what has been seen across the world since international standardised testing began. The OMT report acknowledges in one place that ‘there has been some improvement in learning outcomes’ (p. 21), yet the premise of most of the report is implicitly that one is dealing with a stagnant system that has failed. That is very different to the challenge of learning from past improvements, ensuring that an improvement trajectory seen for almost two decades, up to the start of pandemic, is taken forward.
To cite an example, the DBE has argued that at historical rates of improvement, South Africa would reach Malaysia’s level of educational quality by 2030. Had the report engaged with this, even at face value, we believe the result would have been a more interesting report. (Department of Basic Education, 2023)
2. The report makes the shocking claim that around 60% of classes are not being taught (p. 62). Had the report been consistent, it would have made this a central theme, as it would be a glaring problem, if it were true. The information on the 60% comes from Carnoy et al (2012) and a study of 58 schools in 2009. Carnoy et al are not very clear on how the 60% is derived, but it appears they counted an absence of writing in a learner notebook on a particular day as evidence that there was no teaching. This would be problematic, as classes might be taught where learners do not write.
