Dean Porfirio Goes Global

31 August 2010 | South Africa | Vincent Porfirio

A good friend and fellow researcher from my time in South Africa just emailed me the following article regarding the wide-spread teacher strikes happening in SA as of now.

See link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-31/south-african-teachers-strike-shuts-schools-compounds-educational-crisis.html

BBC News is also covering the story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11136354

This is terrible news for a number of obvious reasons and will require a lot of work by the Ministry of Education and the SA Government. I had been focusing greatly on the FIFA World Cup that recently commenced in SA a few months ago and the news and media coverage seemed for a time to be very positive. This is, however, a reminder of the many issues that the country faces…

I have included the Bloomberg News article in full below and as always welcome commentary from all of you.

In the meantime I will be in touch with my contacts in the country to get as much up-to-date information from them as possible. The teacher strike will effect all students but I think that in the city areas (Cape Town, Jo-burg, etc) will really feel this. Here is the Bloomberg News article written by Mike Cohen:

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South African Teachers’ Strike Shuts Schools, Compounds Educational Crisis

A teachers strike has shut schools across South Africa just weeks before year-end exams, compounding the failures of a state education system that has left more than half the country’s black youths unemployed.

Unions representing about 1.3 million state workers started an open-ended strike on Aug. 18, after the government rejected their demands for an 8.6 percent wage increase. The government offered an increase of 7.5 percent today to end the deadlock.

The strike has highlighted the government’s failure to improve apartheid-era educational levels that have left South Africa one of the world’s most unequal societies. A doubling of the education budget to 165.1 billion rand ($22.4 billion) in five years has failed to reverse a decline in exam results or to improve the standard of teaching.

“We are not getting return for our investment,” said Anne Bernstein, director of the Center for Enterprise Development, a Johannesburg-based research institute. “Some 75 to 80 percent of South African public schools are dysfunctional.”

Final-year pass rates fell to 61 percent last year from 67 percent in 2006. South African grade eight pupils came last in math and science in a 2007 study of 41 countries by the U.S.- based National Center for Education Statistics. Local students scored 326 in science, below Colombia with 411 and Iran with 470. The average was 516.

“While we are doing relatively well on enrolments, our weakness is in the quality of education,” Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said Aug. 25. “This is revealed time and time again.”

Pay Offer

Under today’s pay offer, teachers with one year’s experience will earn about 230,000 rand a year, 50 percent more than four years ago, the Education Ministry says. Unions said they will consult their members and give the government a reply tomorrow. They previously said that the government overstates average teacher’s earnings by about 29,000 rand.

“I can’t survive,” said Nonyameko Mdludlu, 48, who says she has been teaching for 15 years and takes home about 4,300 rand a month after paying her housing loan and other deductions. “That’s why I am on strike. They are just oppressing us,” she said while attending an Aug. 26 protest march to Parliament in Cape Town.

The National Treasury says wages account for 32 percent of the country’s 850 billion-rand annual budget and it needs to reprioritize spending and rein in the budget deficit, which reached a 17-year high of 6.2 percent of gross domestic product in the year through March.

Backlog

Besides higher wages for teachers, the increased education budget has been used to cover the costs associated with the growing number of students in the education system.

The education ministry says it still needs about 140 billion rand to refurbish and equip existing schools and build new ones, a backlog that it says will take 20 years to address given current budget constraints.

A substandard education has left 51 percent of blacks aged between 15 and 24 without jobs, and contributed to a wealth gap that sees 22 percent of the population surviving on less than 283 rand a month. South Africa’s Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, is 0.66, the second highest in the world after neighboring Namibia, a CIA Factbook ranking of latest available data shows. The coefficient measures inequality in a range from zero to 1, with zero referring to total equality.

Industry is starved of skilled workers, even in a country with an unemployment rate of 25.2 percent.

“We need our youngsters to study math, science and accounting at university” and the schooling system isn’t enabling them to do that, said Fezekile Tshiqi, human resources director of Johannesburg-based Nampak Ltd., Africa’s second- biggest packaging maker. The problem “starts with the quality of the teaching and the leadership in the schools.”

Apartheid

Under all-white rule, which ended in 1994, black children were condemned to schools that lacked books, desks, electricity and running water and were largely staffed by teachers who had sub-standard education themselves. Many of those teachers remain in the system and minimal progress has been made in retraining them.

In a September 2009 report, the Treasury said teacher training programs were poorly coordinated and the quality of courses was “questionable.”

Bernstein says there is a lack of “accountability” on the part of teachers. “Many teachers fail to teach and don’t get results, with no consequences whatsoever,” she said.

Curriculum Chaos

The education problems were compounded when the government introduced a system in 1998 whereby teachers were not required to follow a set curriculum and could utilize a wide range of teaching methods to prepare students for exams. It was abandoned this year.

“There have been so many changes to the curriculum within the last 10 years that teachers do not know what they should be doing,” said Ezra Ramasehla, president of the 50,000-member National Professional Teachers Organization of South Africa.

The 12 million pupils at the country’s 25,000 state schools are caught in the middle of the dispute.

“We are not attending school any more, we are just staying home,” said Vuyokazi Sijeku, 20, a grade 12 pupil in the southeastern town of Umtata, who wants to study law next year. “We are worried because we are not going to be ready for the final exams.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Mike Cohen in Cape Town at mcohen21@bloomberg.net.

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25 August 2010 | South Africa, Teach for America, UN | Vincent Porfirio

According to a news article by Doug Gross posted on CNN.com a new yearlong study of 60,000 US cellphone users across the nation provides some insightful data on the use of mobile technology state-side. The link is provided below along with the full story:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/08/25/nielsen.phone.use/index.html?hpt=T2

(CNN) — Women text and talk on their mobile phones more than men.

African-Americans and Hispanics use their phones more than whites, and Southerners out-chat their northern neighbors while on the go.

And here’s a real shocker: Teenagers text way more than anybody else.

Those are the findings of a yearlong survey by the Nielsen Co. The statistics firm studied the monthly mobile phone bills of more than 60,000 U.S. customers.

Women in the survey, whose findings were released Tuesday, spent about 22 percent more time chatting on mobile phones than men. They spent about 856 minutes per month on the line, on average, compared with 667 minutes for men.

Women also texted more, sending or receiving an average of 601 texts per month, compared with 447 for men.

According to the survey’s data, black users sent and received about 780 text messages per month and Hispanics got or sent about 767 — significantly more than whites, who checked in with 566 texts in the same time period.

Both of those groups, as well as Asians and Pacific Islanders, also talk more on their mobile phones than white customers. Black mobile phone users talked about 1,300 minutes a month, on average, followed by Hispanics at 826, Asians and Pacific Islanders at 692, and whites at 647 minutes.

The Nielsen report on the survey, conducted from April 2009 to March 2010, did not offer any possible explanations for the findings.

In the South, folks spent significantly longer chatting on their mobile devices.

In eight Southern states — Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas — users spent more than 800 minutes per month talking.

Florida, with one of the highest median ages in the country, ranked high on the list of active talkers but among the lowest in text messaging.

Meanwhile, the most text-happy states were Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming and Utah. Texters in each state averaged more than 600 messages per month.

In news that will come as no surprise to parents everywhere, teenagers were far and away the busiest texters.

They averaged a thumb-numbing 2,779 texts per month, according to Nielsen.

That’s more than double the 1,299 sent by the 18- to 24-year-old age group, and nearly three times the 952 sent and received by 25- to 34-year-olds.

Not surprisingly, mobile phone users older than 65 were the least active, barely registering with an average of 32 texts per month.

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17 August 2010 | Teach for America | Vincent Porfirio

According to a recent study released the racial gap in America has divided a nation and a people. The new report, Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males 2010 calls the recent graduation numbers for black males in the US a “national crisis,” the report found that only 47 percent of black males graduated from high school in the 2007-2008 school year.

(AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Get the full story at http://www.thegrio.com/specials/making-the-grade/grim-graduate-rates-for-black-males-highlight-racial-gap-in-schools.php

“Another finding of the report is the apparent disparity between states providing opportunities for young black men to succeed. For example, the relative success and wealth of a town is not necessarily associated with positive performance a outcomes: only 22 percent of black high school males graduated from the Palm Beach County Florida public schools compared with 79 percent in Newark, New Jersey. 

Dr. John H. Jackson, president and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education — the organization that produced the study, stresses that the good news for currently cash-strapped states is not about throwing money at a school district, but how you use it:

“The significance of New Jersey’s success is their decision to more equitably distribute their educational resources to all of the districts and students who needed them the most, but also target those resources in areas that are proven effective–providing more access to early education, highly effective teachers and rigorous curricula.”

By contrast, the report states that based on low reading scores, “Minnesota, Nevada, and Mississippi appear to have particular difficulty in providing their black male students in Grade 8 with a basic education.”

The report also paints a depressing picture for large metropolitan areas. “The tragedy of the data is that the four major districts that are most challenged have the largest black male enrollment,” Jackson said. Philadelphia joins New York City in a 28 percent black male graduation rate and Chicago graduates less than half of its black males at 44 percent.

The report is primarily numbers-based and is meant to serve as a measuring tool and benchmark for states and educators. It does not delve into individual programs or cultural factors in the different states.

But at a time when cities and states are struggling with how to “reinvent” themselves in the new economy and how to lure companies to invest in their communities, it is clear that many states have not adequately invested the right resources into what should be one its greatest assets: An educated community.”

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