A major discourse in South African commentaries on education revolves around the need for additional resources. Research by the DoE’s Ministerial Committee (DoE, 2000) identified a lack of monetary resources as key to the way C2005 was being implemented. Chisholm, in her review of C2005, also identified a lack of monetary resources as a major reason why the implementation of the new curriculum was not effecting the envisaged changes at a systemic level. Hence, both studies indicated that monetary resources needed to be increased.
In comparison to many other countries, South Africa spends a large part of its annual budget on education (SAI, 2009). In the 2006 budget, 17.8% of total spending was allocated to education. In his 2009 budget speech, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel (Manuel, 2009) noted that education spending had grown by 14 per cent a year for the past three years and had accounted for R140.4 billion worth of spending in the 2008/9 financial year. To all intents and purposes, then, additional spending on education in a country where the annual spend is already high has been achieved.
The analysis in Chapter Five of this thesis, however, that even in a school with substantial monetary resources and historical privilege, educators subscribed to discourses which were not productive in the way they engaged with portfolio assessment. Even at this school, where training had been provided by the Independent Examining Board, the portfolio was constructed as a file holding evidence of examination preparation. It would therefore appear that the availability of monetary resources and the existence of historical privilege had not impacted on the way educators were constructing portfolio assessment. A more useful indicator of the lack of success in implementing portfolio assessment is arguably educators’ construction of portfolio assessment as a taskmaster which requires them to spend much of their time on menial tasks. Simplification of the bureaucratic demands made in relation to portfolio assessment could, therefore, provide an impetus for improvement which the allocation of additional financial resources has not.
In South Africa there is also evidence of an increasing number of educators leaving the profession (see, for example, Peltzer et al., 2005). In the South African Parliament,
Democratic Alliance Member of Parliament, Mr. Boinama, argued for the need to train and retain teachers and proposed a new initiative to try to do this (Parliamentary Monitoring Minutes, 12 February, 2008). In addition to the provision of financial resources, then, there would appear to be another argument developing around the need for more resources in the form of educators (see also Vinjevold, 2009).
Darling-Hammond (1996) suggests that the decision on the part of educators to leave the profession is not an isolated problem but rather a global trend. Darling-Hammond go on to argue that educators choose to leave teaching because of a perceived lack of support and because of feeling both isolated and silenced phenomena which were all apparent in the discourses identified in Chapter Five of this thesis. Several of the educators interviewed noted that, although they had sought help from the regional offices of the Department of Education, their requests had either not found a response or the response offered had been inadequate.
In Chapter Five, the issue of the deprofessionalisation of educators is identified. Mattson and Harley (2003) also identified this in their research noting that educators as professionals are often closed off from decisions made in the education system and instead are instructed to take the role of administrator within the classroom. As Chapter Five has also shown,
educators become immersed in providing evidence to take to moderation and their teaching is reduced to managerial and bureaucratic work. According to Mattson and Harley (2003), the Introduction of outcomes-based education is not simply a new approach to pedagogy but rather a challenge to the beliefs of educators and communities at a profound level;
something which is also indicated in the analysis of interviews with educators and also, I would argue, in the analysis of the CGD itself since it is evident that the writers of the Guide themselves have not entirely taken on the shifts in thinking and believing necessary for the successful implementation of portfolio assessment.
As a result of their research in South African schools, Pryor and Lubisi (2002) note that educators who were initially keen to embrace new progressive forms of assessment lost enthusiasm as the training and support they needed to put the principles and ideas into practice failed to materialise. This perceived lack of support was also apparent in my data, with educators noting that they wanted to do what was asked of them, but felt frustrated with the lack of help and understanding in what was being asked of them to do. Most indicated that they relied solely on other educators to help them interpret the CGD and implement what it required them to do. The data also indicated that the educators felt that they could not practice their craft of teaching because they had too many demands placed on them to provide evidence that they have done their job well. As already noted, one educator stated that what was asked of her was “too much” (see Chapter Five).
Given these conditions, it is hardly surprising that educators should choose to leave the field. In my data, however, the need for resources in the form of additional educators was never mentioned as a factor hindering the implementation of portfolio assessment. Rather, the
support that was made available. In interviews educators indicated that the experts sent to train them, often lacked expertise in the very tools they were supposed to be supporting. In addition, training was offered in a haphazard fashion.
Rather than calling for additional resources, both financial and human, in order to improve the implementation of C2005, the research on which this thesis is based identifies the development of existing resources as key if portfolio assessment is to be introduced and implemented in ways which are meaningful and which make good on the claims made for it in the literature. The need for work valuing educators as professionals would also appear to be crucial. In interviews, educators constructed portfolio assessment as involving a series of arduous and menial tasks, all of which kept them away from actual teaching. This coupled with the sense of being subject to ongoing surveillance is hardly conducive to the successful implementation of a form of assessment intended to be empowering and emancipating for both educators and learners.
South African learners write the school leaving examinations in October and November of each year. The release of results in late December or early January of the following year is inevitably accompanied by high profile press coverage most of which is negative. If pass rates on the school leaving examination increase, then claims of lowered standards inevitably result as they did in 2009. If pass rates fall, then claims of poor performance on the part of educators, teachers and the national system result. The focus in popular discourse on the final school leaving examination means that it achieves such high stakes status that there is little space for interrogation of what it can actually mean as an indicator of meaningful learning by learners who now need to be ready to contribute to a global economy or enter higher education to develop the skills it seeks in its workers. The effect of these popular discourses in educators’ practices was evident in the Chapter Five. In addition to a focus on the provision of support and development for educators, therefore, perhaps what is needed is for challenges to dominant understandings of assessment, learning and, indeed, schooling, to be inserted into popular discourse. Given the appropriation of a form of assessment practice intended to enhance the quality of learning by traditional discourses identified in the research reported upon in this thesis, then such challenges would appear to be crucial if change is to be achieved.