4 April 2003
I feel honoured to have been invited to address the fifth Education 2000 annual conference, especially since it is taking place during the CEPD's tenth anniversary! Education is central to the transformation process. It provides people with the possibility to take up opportunities that they were previously denied, allows our country to develop its human resources and its cultural life in order to improve the living standards of all, and plays a central role in building a democratic and humane nation. It is therefore important that progressive policy units like yours continue to contest the neo-liberal notion that education is an expenditure rather than an investment in the country's human resources development and a crucial weapon in the struggle to overcome the apartheid legacy and its interrelated contradictions of class, race and gender.
Education 2000+ and the importance of ongoing policy monitoring and evaluation
Many new policies have been introduced since 1994 with the intention of making the education system more equitable and democratic and improving the quality of education received by learners. Some of these policies have been found wanting and our Minister and Department of Education have reviewed and amended some, and are continuously reviewing and amending others.
It is essential to monitor these policies and their implementation in order to determine whether their intended outcomes are being achieved and to identify and correct weaknesses. This has already happened in a number of cases such as with Curriculum 2005, and is currently in the process of happening with the review of financing, resourcing and the costs of education in public schools, as well as the review of school governance.
One of the main reasons why it is important to monitor both policy and implementation is because there is a dialectical relationship between the two. Observation and analysis of practice needs to feed back into the policy development process so that policies are continually tested and, if necessary, refined or even replaced. Without this process, it is not possible for policy to be a useful instrument of transformation.
It is for this reason that a project like Education 2000+ is so important and why its findings need to be communicated widely to policy makers, researchers and mass organisations in education, as well as the media. The strength of this project is that it is a longitudinal study which monitors the state of South African schooling and trends in its transformation through an investigation into the schooling system at different levels: policy development and implementation at the national, provincial and school levels. The project's strength also lies in its investigation of developments across all themes of relevance to education, such as curriculum, finance, learning and teaching, teacher development, governance, management, HIV/AIDS. Perhaps it should also investigate the inter-relationship between these. Education 2000+ is a unique study in that it monitors progress over time - it is now in its fifth year - as opposed to other studies which focus on single issues over a short period of time.
Amongst the important contributions made by the Education 2000+ project is that it has given opportunities to young researchers from disadvantaged backgrounds to conduct research and to develop their skills in all aspects of research from project conceptualisation to instrument development, fieldwork, data analysis, data interpretation and writing. The publications arising from this project bear testimony to this.
Education 2000+ is therefore placed in a unique position to trace the contours of educational transformation in our country, its ups and downs, as well as the changes taking place. We need to ensure that in this process we do not lose sight of specific time-bound conjunctural developments that could provide crucial insights into the entire process of transformation in our country. In turn, such specific conjunctural developments need to be located always within the broader context of educational and policy transformation in our country.
The context and content of educational policy evaluation and monitoring
In the process of doing policy evaluation, it is important to analyse, in an ongoing manner, both the context and the content of policy evaluation, including the very paradigms that inform our methodologies and the questions we ask. Let me briefly touch on the context of policy evaluation and monitoring in education.
Mass struggles, organisation and education policy evaluation
Let me dwell briefly on the dialectical relationship between the mass movement and mass struggles and policy development and evaluation. It appears that mass struggles around education issues are on the decline. During the apartheid and immediate post-apartheid periods, the democratic movement had demanded broad-sweeping changes in legislation, such as those around democratic school governance. Such changes were instituted, but now there is no vibrancy around participation in the new governance structures. Once our demands are won, we rest. This is problematic as it creates a vacuum and could erode the gains made during the anti-apartheid struggles for people's power. Today, there is an absence of, for example, local education fora involving communities fighting for educational transformation.
This is a challenge which we as progressive educationists must be part of trying to address. Such fora should be pushing the right to free and compulsory education, amongst other things, and assessing whether progress is being made in this regard. We must do a critical policy appraisal around where the blockages are, what resources are needed, and so on. The involvement of communities is essential if we are to avoid a bureaucratic and sterile environment enveloping the policy development, implementation and evaluation processes. Each has to feed into the other.
Growth and Development Summit, education policies and the overall economic policy framework
It is also essential that there is a strong education voice at the forthcoming Growth and Development Summit (to be held in May this year). No growth and development strategy can succeed without addressing the question of education to promote human resource and skills development. The summit must address challenges facing the education system and how to transform it fully. Such challenges include the achievement of the right to basic education, the provision of adult basic education, recognition of prior learning, and so on. If the summit is to address such crucial questions, it needs a strong education voice.
In preparing for the Growth and Development Summit, certain priority areas have been identified: Investment and productivity, job creation, social equity, local economic initiatives, micro enterprises and co-operatives, and prices and inflation. Clearly, all these issue in one way or the other affect or require educational policy input, particularly within the broad framework of developing an overarching human resources development strategy for our country.
The education sector stands to benefit if it seeks to consciously engage with developments around the Growth and Development Summit. We all know that there is an infrastructural backlog in education in South Africa. We should be using the summit's focus on investment and job creation to raise the question of educational backlogs as a key priority area.
There is also a deeper tension and contradiction that we need to tease out around education policy evaluation and monitoring. Our government has very progressive education policies - and other social policies for that matter - but there is weakness around the ability of its economic policies to attain what is in these education policies. Debates around a growth and development strategy also provide an opportunity to deepen our understanding of this tension. The Growth and Development Summit is not a be-all, nor will it be a panacea to the problems we face. But it provides an important terrain around which to further engage on these issues. We must critically engage with and review this relationship between progressive education policies and the government's economic policies and strategies that do not necessarily create an environment conducive to the development of the quality education system we need.
The global context and education policy
In addition to our local environment, we must not forget that we are operating in a global environment. We have to locate our policy development and monitoring processes such as Education 2000+ within this global context. We are in the midst of an unjust, criminal war on Iraq, where neo-liberal ideas are now being backed by force. In the global context, there is a drift towards injecting more private content into public education; hence the need to struggle for quality public education.
The education policy evaluation and monitoring paradigm
The challenge for the CEPD and the EPUs, as well as for other progressive education policy analysts, is to find the right balance between micro and macro-education policy issues. There is tension between education policy evaluation for liberation and democracy versus commodification of policy services, which has resulted in a move towards consulting to survive financially, and hence to become praise-singers rather than organs of critical analysis. We must avoid this trap. Much as we as policy analysts need to analyse the work of others, we must also consistently evaluate our own paradigms. How are they being affected by capitalist globalisation? How are we responding to new concepts, such as branding and outsourcing? To what extent are we examining the new discourse? I am sure you do these things and we can only encourage you to do more of this. The Education 2000+ project provides an ideal platform for ongoing interrogation of our very own paradigms, explicit or implicit, and the tools we use to evaluate policy.
In conclusion, I would like to congratulate the research consortium led by the CEPD and including the EPUs at Natal, Fort Hare and Wits, and the Education Foundation. Viva CEPD on its tenth anniversary!
Blade Nzimande
General Secretary, SACP
3 April 2003