In order to cope with the fiscal pressure in the Western Cape following cuts by the Treasury, the Western Cape Education Department has had to plan for slashing thousands of jobs in education.

This naturally has the unions up in arms, but no right-thinking person listens to South African trade unions. David Manier however, has chosen to cower, and slash non-teaching jobs instead (which probably should have been slashed anyway).

The real harm would come from not using this as an opportunity to cut out the dead wood.

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Slow crisis

South Africa has a notoriously terrible education system. But this has nothing to do with money - we spend more on education than most countries, and get way less bang for our buck.

For 2022/23, education claimed 19.9% of government spending, amounting to R429.7 billion—more than what countries like France, the UK, and Australia allocate. Yet, this expenditure yields dismal outcomes, and we are outperformed by markedly poorer African countries like Kenya and Tanzania, or even eSwatini.

South Africa’s dropout rates are alarming. Half of all grade 1s don’t know the letters of the alphabet, and 78% of Grade 4 learners can’t read for meaning in any language. Less than half of the students who began Grade 1 in 2010 passed Matric in 2021. The much-touted 76.4% pass rate for the Class of 2021 hides this grim reality—only one in two pupils from that cohort made it to the end.

The crisis extends into higher education, where only 20% of students complete their undergraduate studies. Poor preparation in basic education leaves even top matriculants struggling at university. Financial constraints exacerbate this, with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) unable to meet the demand. In 2022, NSFAS funded 1.2 million students but rejected another 286,000.

A burgeoning shift towards private schooling has arisen as a consequence. Since 2000, private school enrollment in the Eastern Cape has surged by 787.5%, reflecting a national increase of 174%. This trend underscores the deteriorating quality of public education, driving parents to seek better alternatives.

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Teacher quality

The simple reason for all of this, is that our teachers suck.

Our teachers are notoriously lazy and abusive, and the experience of any talented, hardworking or intelligent teacher at a state school will bear this out - their colleagues are almost universally predatory and resentful of any competition, and will break down any colleague that visibly outperforms them.

As the CDE reported, we simply cannot find teachers smart or diligent enough to teach any of the hard subjects like maths or science.

South Africa's education system faces profound challenges, exacerbated by the dual crises of teacher quality and corruption. While poverty and infrastructural shortcomings play a role, the real culprits are the inadequacies of educators and the pervasive corruption within the system.

The report identifies two primary causes of poor teaching. First, many teachers lack the necessary content knowledge and pedagogical skills. Second, a significant number are simply unwilling to improve.

Four out of five public school teachers are not equipped to teach their subjects at all. For instance, only 41% of South African maths teachers demonstrate basic proficiency, far behind their counterparts in Kenya (95%) and Zimbabwe (87%). Furthermore, 79% of Grade 6 maths teachers in South Africa scored below 60% on a test designed for their own students.

Worse, we have the highest teacher absenteeism rate in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), standing at 10% in 2017.

And then there’s the corrupt capture by the unions (may the Lord grant them antibiotic-resistant syphilis).

The 2015 National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (NEEDU) report uncovered widespread union-led corruption in teacher hiring and promotions, infamously dubbed the "jobs for cash" scandal. The scandal involved members of SADTU, the dominant teacher union, manipulating school governing bodies to secure positions for those who paid bribes. In KwaZulu-Natal, for example, principal and deputy principal roles were routinely sold for between R30,000 and R45,000.

In 2016, the Minister of Education appointed a ministerial task team (MTT) to investigate. The MTT found that SADTU had effectively taken control of education management in six, if not more, of the country’s nine provinces. Astonishingly, all deputy directors-general of the Department of Basic Education (DBE) were SADTU members.

Despite the MTT's findings, no government official implicated in the scandal has been prosecuted or suspended. Moreover, none of the key recommendations to combat corruption and prevent further state capture have been implemented.

Having several family and friends in the education sector, it is also traansparent that our teaching colleges teach nothing. I do not mean that as an exaggeration - having witnessed the coursework of a couple of relatives and spoken to them about the quality of the classrooms, it is clear that almost nothing relevant to teaching is taught in any class, standards are not upheld.

Worse, the students are regularly exposed to predatory financial practices by sloppy financial departments covering their arses by forcing the students to sign ownership of debt that is rightfully owed by NSFAS or other agencies.

And when they go out for work experience, universities do not defend their students from abusive or chaotic work environments, and allow the prejudices of their supervisory teachers on the job to be the final answer regardless of the degree of departure from decency or sensibility.

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Opportunity

Unfortunately, tertiary education is an exclusively national competency, so nothing the provincial government does could fix this end of the problem.

But we can break the unions and cut out much of the poison.

With a budget shock like this (and the province has no control over its budget - 97% of it comes at the discretion of the National Treasury) David Manier had a golden opportunity to break the parasites at SADTU by purging thousands of terrible, parasitic and abusive teachers.

Many might say that a bad teacher is better than none, but this is patently false. A small class taught by a bad teacher is worse than a large class taught by a good one, and a school full of worthless teachers will prevent any good teacher from shining.

The best thing that could have come of this restructuring would have been a purge of the 5% worst teachers in every school, with a graduated weighting of the retrenchment according to school performance, allowing worst-off schools to absorb some of the merely average teachers from the better schools.

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Evidence on mass layoffs

The 5% I quoted is not an entirely arbitrary figure - it was proposed by Stanford public education specialist Eric Hanuschek, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth from his his left-wing colleagues. But even left-wing research bodies in America recognise the truth of his remarks.

It is of course widely recognised that blind layoffs reduce the quality of student outcomes, and many choose to lean on this as the bedrock of their argument, as Stellenbosch left-wing academic Jonathan Jansen did recently on Cape Talk. And naturally, this will impact the poorer students hardest, as most policies do.

But this is equally true of the positive effects - the worst teachers tend to be at the worst schools, which tend to be the poorest. But that simply means they need the purge more than everyone else. Many young student teachers are waiting in the wings to fill these posts, and many struggle to find posts.

But in case anyone thinks my position is too radical, you should see what Colombia Business School research found - that having an 80% turnover after two years is the optimum way of achieving quality teachers. Of course, this was a programming model based on large-scale data, but this sort of turnover should be the main anchor for our thinking - if we are not churning through teachers at a regular rate, we will end up with mere benchwarmers and babysitters.

Another key contextualising observation is that the quality of a teacher does not generally improve much with experience. It turns out that after the first two years or so, teachers have acquired all the experience-based improvement they are likely to get.

So if you want to rescue our schools, rescue them from the teachers who are wrecking them, and say no to these crybully union parasites.

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