The fact that student performance in South Africa is shockingly low is now commonly accepted by most researchers in education.  Most of South Africa's primary schools perform worse than poorer schools in poorer African countries.  South Africa has in turn invested a lot of money in education and yet instead of being a ladder of social mobility, the educational system is a propagating mechanism favouring the certain interest groups, creating strange bedfellows and mired in political corruption.  All this drama is unfolding while South Africa as a Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) members is churning out poorly baked Matrics which raises many questions: what are the chances of educational reform in SA? Do we really need the Unions involved in the educational reform sector?  More importantly, given our current rate of illiterate production, and how do we maintain and upgrade or status in BRICS?  That said, it is critical to emphasize that we don’t need to look at any more models. We have all the bureaucratic paperwork necessary to implement the necessary reforms which includes the latest policy piece, the National Development Plan (NDP). The key question this article addresses is whether South Africa as a member of the BRICS initiative can successfully reform its education particularly within the current status quo. 

Brazil, a BRICS members makes an interesting case study as it is also a developing country with several factors in common with South Africa such as a large poor Black population, in an unequal society, strong Unions that used to politically dictate the educational path, poor pass rates, rural educational challenges, and problematic teachers  According to a 2006 Unicef study, Brazilian teachers are often poorly educated and teach on subjects they know little about, while no federal programme exists to better train and monitor their performance.  In the most recent available data, from 2009, an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study ranked Brazil 52nd out of 65 countries in reading and science. PISA also maintains how more than a tenth of spending goes on pupils who are repeating grades: an astonishing 15% of those graduating from secondary school have been over 25.  Two-thirds of 15-year-olds are capable of no more than basic arithmetic. Half cannot draw inferences from what they read, or give any scientific explanation for familiar phenomena.  Money is also needed to improve infrastructure, with many primary and secondary schools facing a shortage of desks, chairs, and supplies.  With children under 15 years of age accounting for one-fourth of its population of 200 million, the challenges are enormous.

Then there are the Brazilian teachers unions. In his article Brazil's education challenge.  Eduardo  Gomez discusses how the most active teacher's unions are the regional Sindicato dos Professores (SINPROs), Sindicato Nacional e Democrático dos Professores (SINDEP), and Associação Nacional de Docentes de Ensino Superior (ANDES). During the 1980s and 1990s, they leaned politically to the left, creating monopolies in forums and conferences. From a work perspective, interestingly, unlike South Africa where teaching after hours remains a problem, the teachers there have been known 2 teach two shifts a day (often in two different schools). Teacher absenteeism was high, partly because of the difficulty of getting from one school to the other in city traffic or along rural roads.  The teachers unions according to OECD at one point would reject any official attempts to make it easier to get rid of teachers who don't perform. The OECD maintains how there were once periods when teachers could be absent for 40 of the year's 200 school-days without having their pay docked. Basically, like South Africa, Brazil battled and continues to battle many challenges such as tackling the vested interests of administrators, teachers' unions and bureaucrats which makes it one of the most politically difficult things any country can do.

However, unlike South Africa, the state government made progress over the years which in a great part was accomplished through taking on the unions.  Particularly in your big states like Sao Paulo. 

Interestingly, most of the educational reforms in South Africa were also significantly implemented post 1994.  Barbara Bruns, an economist at the World Bank who has written a book about Brazilian schools, praises the current school system, created over the past 15 years, of rating schools on how much students learn and how many of them drop out or repeat grades. She states how from a starting point of having no information on student learning, the former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva constructed one of the world's most impressive systems for measuring education results. 

Katty Kay in Booming Brazil held back by education gap states how over the past decade, the Brazilian government has launched a major effort to improve education, increasing spending in classrooms and on teacher salaries and providing extra help for poorer families in order to get children into classrooms. Its National Education Plan has transformed the country into a laboratory of best education practices. 

One of the main objectives was to raise the quality of Brazil's 1.5 million teachers.  Various stakeholders are also assisting in the development of teachers.  Itaú Social, the charitable arm of a big bank, is coaching teachers in struggling schools, paying for parent-school liaison workers and training head teachers in management. São Paulo state has created a career track for teachers who do well on tests of subject knowledge; the city of Rio de Janeiro is tackling teacher absenteeism by giving schools bonuses for hitting targets—to be shared out only among teachers with good attendance records. If Brazil does make the grade, it will be because it has managed to spread such innovative practices without any political and corruptive hindrances. Brazil over the past 15 years has made great strides as there has been an increase in the number of qualified teachers.

The government also introduced a new indicator of education quality called the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB), in order to track schools' performance. IDEB draws on student test results and graduation rates to provide a nation-wide performance map through which the federal government can identify weaknesses and provide technical and cash assistance. For states, the combination of monitoring and support provides a real incentive to use effective strategies and improve student achievement. States have to diagnose the problems in low-performing schools and develop an improvement plan to send to the federal education ministry. The ministry in turn tracks progress in order to identify best practices that can be shared with other states.

Gomez also argues that like her predecessor, President Rousseff has also committed to strengthening the quality of Brazilian education. This has included offering technical and financial support to schools, especially in rural areas.  Access to education, facilitated through the Bolsa Familia programme, has continued to widen under President Rousseff.  This provides monthly grants for families on condition that parents send their children to schools and ensure they receive immunisation shots.  Another innovation which Ms Rousseff has implemented is the Science without Borders programme. 

The Brazilian Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology have started sending 100,000 students on scholarships to foreign universities, while agreeing to host students from other countries. These scholarships are explicitly designed for courses on topics ranging from maths, physics, and biology, to aerospace, oil, gas, and biotechnology. The government is committed to funding 75,000 scholarships, and the private sector 25,000. The overall goal is to strengthen the level of knowledge and training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Simply put, if South Africa wants to develop from an emerging economy to an emerged economy like its Brazilian counterpart, it will have to remove politics from the process and do a better job educating its population.  South Africa also needs to realize that improving education takes time - time this country doesn't have much of. The more we fool around with education, the more we dig ourselves in a deeper economic sink hole.  There are also too many studies out there demonstrating that Unions in the educational sector that become involved in running the educational process have usually focused on the interests of the teachers, not the process of education.  The only solution is to remove politics from education, roll up our sleeves by applying the National Development Plan and sticking to it, and redefining the roles of the Union in education, so that administrators can focus on the business of improving our national education.

Written by Funeka Yazini April, Research Specialist: Democracy and Governance, Africa Institute of South Africa