How to Save South Africa’s Illiterate Children

President Cyril Ramaphosa used his State of the Nation Address (SONA) to deliver a blustery defence of black economic empowerment (BEE) as essential to liberating millions of South Africans from a life of poverty. A week later, data on whether South Africa’s schoolchildren can read came to public attention (reported on by The Common Sense), demonstrating just how far off the mark his policy priorities are.

Even for people familiar with South Africa’s state-led education system, the reading data are shocking. Only a third of pupils can read at the required level by the end of Grade 3. Perhaps the most shocking is that 15% of Grade 3 children cannot read a single word. In some language groups, for example among Pedi pupils, that figure rises to 25%.

Even among the richest quintile of schools, just 60% of pupils can read at the required level by the end of Grade 3. The problem is therefore not poverty or resources.

Imagine the consequences. If you cannot read, you cannot learn – your mind is effectively stunted and your prospects in life are essentially over. And even for pupils who can read at the requisite level, the standard is hardly such as to suggest that a middle-class career is on the horizon. The opposite is true, and as The Common Sense has previously reported, just around five in 100 children will pass maths in matric with a grade of 50% or higher.

Yet for all the hue and cry that will follow the reading data, you can be pretty sure that neither the minister nor the government will do much to change anything. The reason is that they don’t have to, because parents and communities around schools have no direct power to change how schools are run. Yes, they can vote for change, but for what change exactly? The Democratic Alliance now runs education and appears chiefly satisfied to continue in government in practice with the policies of the African National Congress.

Absurdly, the whole mess can be fixed by getting the state out of schools and schools out of the state.

Nothing that governments run works as well as what the private sector does – for the reason that private enterprises have to compete for the business of paying customers who have choices. If you want to fix schools you've got to turn them into businesses and empower parents to become paying consumers.

Here is how:

Offer parents at each school a vote. Either the school continues as it is or the school is sold to the community for R1, and parents are issued vouchers to the value of what the state would in any event have spent on their children’s schooling. The state would then approve, via an open process, a series of suitable private education providers to tender to take over the management of any school that opts out of the state, subject to standards set by regulators. Parents would then choose where to send their children, and the firms running the schools would be forced to compete for their business. Schools could raise additional funds from corporate social investment schemes. Even better is that BEE points are awarded to firms that finance schools and top up the government-issued vouchers (this newspaper supports retaining BEE but stripping out the extent to which it taxes capital while allowing firms to win points for job creation, fixed investment, tax payments, and export contributions – together with voluntary social investment programmes).

Mr Ramaphosa’s SONA statements show how vacuous the BEE policy practised by his government has become in the face of what is really keeping poor people down. Blessedly, as is so often the case, the solutions to change that are straightforward and easily at hand.