The Centre for Development & Enterprise (CDE) published an important report in March about the crisis in SA’s schools. It makes for grim reading (“Fixing SA’s schools requires a new leadership team”, April 4).
In 2021, more than half of pupils ending grade one did not know all the letters of the alphabet. In 2016 more than three quarters of grade four pupils could not read for meaning in any language. They are most likely lost to basic literacy forever.
Even grimmer is how much better countries with fewer resources than SA perform. Kenya, Morocco, Vietnam, Egypt and Albania all spend less per learner than SA does but achieve far better results.
What’s the problem? The report lists several, but it gives pride of place to one. The department of basic education has been wholly captured by the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu). Every deputy director-general in that department is a member of the union, for instance. The result is that any project that even hints at evaluating performance is scuppered.
The report is invaluable, and we should be grateful for it, but its explanation of why Sadtu captured the department does not go deep enough. One way to go deeper is via Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, one of the most influential works of social science written in the 20th century.
How does a declining organisation turn around, Hirschman asks. Broadly, there are two ways. First, its members exercise “voice”: they fight for better services, either because they are loyal or because they have nowhere else to go. Alternatively, members leave. Hirschman calls this “exit”. The institution will either win them back or die.
But this is not always true, Hirschman continues. There are cases when the sudden availability of exit neither improves nor kills a bad institution; it just gets worse. This happens when a public service used by the poor and well-off alike is opened to competition.
“There are ... cases,” Hirschman writes, “where competition does not restrain monopoly as it is supposed to, but comforts and bolsters it by unburdening it of its more troublesome customers.” What emerges, he argues, is a “monopoly-tyranny ... an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy”.
This is precisely what happened to education in SA. In the early 1990s an internal market was opened up in state schools. If you could pay for it, your kids could get out of the township and join the kids in the richer, better suburban schools.
This may be why SA does so poorly relative to Vietnam, Morocco and others. It is because SA is more unequal. Its large and vastly wealthier middle classes divest from public goods. The most powerful voice remaining is that of the incompetent and the lazy.
The CDE gives this dynamic little analytical weight. Indeed, it excludes it entirely from the report’s executive summary. As a result, its diagnosis is superficial. The root cause of the problem isn’t the dominance of Sadtu. The union’s dominance is a symptom of the exit of other powerful voices.
This is more than a quibble. How you frame things matters. If you say the cause of the problem is Sadtu your solution is a strong president who takes Sadtu on. But if you say the cause of the problem is that public goods crumble when the middle classes exit, the CDE’s proposed solution looks weaker and less thought through.
A president is only strong when he has a strong alliance behind him, a cacophony of effective voices composed of others who have not yet exited. Who might constitute that alliance?
The CDE report implores business to throw its weight, but does business really have the stamina and the will? It may just have the strength of conviction to fix energy and transport, because if the power goes out and the trains don’t work business life can’t go on.
But education? I’m not so sure. The real intellectual task is to imagine how to fashion voices from those who have not exited. I don’t know how to do that. But nor does the CDE, for it has not identified the problem.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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