As an informed citizenry we are getting better at understanding and interpreting the matric results. We know that improving matric results is about improving the education system as a whole.
We know that getting foundation phase pupils to read better, write better and calculate better is key to improving matric results in the long term.
We know that getting teachers to teach on task and on time is vital, as is ensuring that good teachers enter the system and are promoted within the system without having to buy their posts.
A new theme has strongly emerged this year, thanks to commentators arguing that the “real” pass rate for 2016 is much lower than 72% and could be as low as 40%. It’s easy to work out these numbers. If 440 000 matrics passed out of 610 000 pupils who wrote matric in 2016, then the pass rate is 72%.
But if we go back two years and take a look at how many Grade 10s there were in 2014, it’s not 610 000, but 1.1 million! If only 440 000 passed out of 1.1 million, then the pass rate is 40%.
Around 500 000 pupils “disappeared” from 2014 to 2016. Some are still in the system, some have moved to technical colleges, but many have dropped out.
Take a while to reflect on what this means for South Africa and then get very worried. The unemployment rate of our youth hovers over 50%.
How are we going to tackle this problem if we have such a high drop-out rate from Grade 10 to 12?
What we certainly don’t need in this context are perverse incentives for schools to actively encourage poorly performing pupils to drop out.
A perverse incentive is a negative unintended consequence of a policy. We have a policy to improve our matric pass rate – schools, wards, districts, provinces and the national department all have to show improvement in their pass rates. What if the simplest way to improve your pass rate is to get rid of those pupils who are performing badly?
It’s not what the national department intends to encourage, but at school level it’s an easy option to take. It would be an unfortunate path to follow that is damaging to pupils, to families, to communities and to South Africa as a whole. Something like this was happening across the country in the past, with schools keeping poorly performing pupils from progressing to matric.
The national department has tackled this problem, and now we are tracking progressed pupils and have special policies in place to assist them.
This has resulted in our overall throughput rate of pupils from Grade 2 to matric improving over the last couple of years from 34% in 2010 to 42% in 2016. This is to be celebrated.
So where is the perverse incentive? To see it we have to go down to a provincial level and ask a simple question: Which provinces improved their matric pass rates the most from 2015 to 2016?
Three provinces improved dramatically – KZN improved by 6 percentage points, Free State 7 and the Northern Cape 9. These improvements meant that the Free State jumped in the rankings from third in 2015 to first in 2016, KZN from eighth to seventh and the Northern Cape from sixth to fifth place.
In all these provinces, the MECs are either praising their current initiatives or nailing their predecessors, or both. But these provinces have one thing in common – they have far fewer Grade 12s writing matric this year in comparison to last year.
The three provinces that showed the highest drop in numbers writing matric are the three provinces whose pass rate percentages went up the most.
It’s a simple logic: get rid of those pupils who could fail, and your pass rate goes up.
In the Northern Cape and Free State there was a 14% drop in the numbers writing matric from 2015 to 2016, and in KZN a 9% drop.
To be fair, there was a national 5% drop in numbers writing matric from 2015 to last year, but it is the provinces which increased their drop-out rate the most which also increased their pass rate the most.
That is a perverse incentive, and it is going to be hard for other provinces not to follow suit in 2017 unless a national interrogation of why the Free State, Northern Cape and KZN did so well is undertaken.
It’s a social-justice issue: if pupils are being excluded from writing matric because they threaten the matric pass rate, then we have entered a crazy world where a statistic takes precedence over the future lives of our youth and the health of our country.
The department has managed to put in policy directives and tracking devices for progressed pupils. It’s now a matter of urgency that the same is done for pupils who drop out. To the credit of the department, it has identified the dropout problem and will be putting policies in place to ensure that provinces are held accountable for their throughput rates as well as their pass rates.
This should help deal with the perverse incentive of allowing struggling pupils to drop out of the system and provide us with a more socially just way of measuring matric results.
● Hugo is a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Education and Development.