The non-profit group Equal Education has for years received good press from the establishment media. It parades as a decent, good group raising money purportedly to fight for children’s rights and to improve South Africa’s badly run schools. It is anything but that and, together with its sometime partner the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), spends its money campaigning against the reforms South Africa needs if it is to fix those schools.

There has been no starker case study of this than the multi-year lobby and court action the two groups have run against the introduction of what is, in practice, a variation of the charter school model for South Africa, a (too) diluted version of which was being pioneered by the Western Cape government as “collaboration schools”.

What is a charter school, or its diluted relative, a collaboration school?

Picture the scene. A failing primary school in a dirt-poor community. Half the children cannot read. Teaching jobs are traded for cash via the union. If you want to teach, you pay a bribe and keep paying that bribe out of your salary month after month. Want to become a principal? Pay a larger bribe. The good teachers are stretched, their depraved peers are drunk and have sex with pupils on school grounds, drugs are sold at the school gate, the principal is overwhelmed and has long since given up, knowing that violent union retribution will be the consequence for speaking up. Some teachers have been assassinated for threatening to expose the racket. The education department is running 2 000 other schools from an office far away, and parents are powerless in the face of union violence. Nothing changes for years because nothing has to.

Now change one thing. The government still owns the school, is still responsible for the teachers, still decides what is taught, and still determines whether fees are charged or not. But the job of actually running the place is handed to an organisation with experience in running world-class schools, a professional private service provider, and one that may raise private funding to help run the school and improve the facilities and services provided.

That organisation signs a contract with the government in which the government sets out what the results must look like and by when. That will be audited, and if the provider falls short, it loses the school.

That is the basis of what a charter school is, and there are variations on the model. Britain has been doing it for twenty years and calls them academies. America calls them charters. They work extremely well wherever they have been introduced because management is professionalised and taken out of state and union hands. To South Africa’s unions and their allies on the left, this is a major threat because it is going to expose the racket and bring it down.

Why Does South Africa Need to Follow Suit?

At this newspaper, we have set out the answer time and again. A minority of South Africa’s children can read and write properly. Hundreds of thousands of children drop out of school in their final years, and fewer than one in 10 children will get a good maths pass, which in South Africa is the single most important marker of whether they have any chance of working their way into a middle-class lifestyle.

Stop for a moment and think what you would do if that were your child. If you subscribe to this newspaper, you have probably solved that problem already, because you live a middle-class life. But think how terrible every day would be for you if you did not have the resources you do have and knew, therefore, that your child was being stunted and there was nothing that anyone would do to stop that.

And that is not because of a lack of resources. South Africa spends a competitive amount on education compared to its global peers that produce much better school results. The problem, as with the management of Eskom, South African Airways, the police, or the City of Johannesburg, is that those resources are wasted through corruption and incompetence. Solve that problem and South Africa's’ children will get a good education.

The Western Cape government was moving to do this, but Equal Education and SADTU approached the courts to block it on the spurious grounds that the education rights of parents and others were being impeded and that the province was clashing with national education laws. They have been doing this for years, in addition to running the most extreme media and related campaigns against greater private management of state schools in South Africa. A few days ago, the Supreme Court of Appeal shut their latest effort down, saying there was no clash between what the Western Cape was doing and what national legislation prescribed.

But count on it that Equal Education is already planning its next attack against South Africa’s children and their desperate and poor parents. The parallels here are exactly in line with what we wrote about two weeks ago, when an again well-funded non-profit lobby shut down South Africa’s oil and gas prospecting prospects, putting out of play one of the key industries the country needs to stage an economic recovery.

South Africa’s prospects are being sabotaged by elite-funded non-profit lobbies, financed chiefly from abroad but also by progressive high-net-worth families inside the country. It is an evil business and, in this case, so much more so, given that it, in practice, perpetuates the consequences of the Bantu Education system of South Africa’s apartheid past.