A Long Way to Go

South Africa, with its 28,000 schools and 12 million students, faces its share of educational challenges in the wake of 40 years of apartheid, and, more recently, a decade of attempts toward reform. In February, authors Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Education about their recent work, Elusive Equity: Education Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa, which details the story of South Africa's racially based hardships and subsequent efforts to repair the educational inequality that thrived throughout the country's troubled history.

As part of their research, Ladd and Fiske--writing partners as well as husband and wife--spent six months living in South Africa in 2002 and visited dozens of schools, focusing their study on two distinctive provinces, chosen carefully, said Ladd, to represent "two areas of extremes": the Eastern Cape province, where the white population in 1996 stood at 5.2 percent and the poverty rate at 64 percent; and the Western Cape, which is among the two wealthiest provinces in South Africa, with a white population of 21 percent in 1996 and a poverty rate of less than 18 percent.

"I suspect many of you are here because you are fascinated by the whole transformation process in South Africa," said Helen Ladd, a professor at Duke's Sanford Institute, at the forum. "We believe, and I suspect you would agree, that education is central to that transformation process."

The framework of the book, explained Ladd, involved three concepts: race-blind treatment or equal treatment of schools and students; issues of access for students of different races; and educational adequacy within a system in which all races participate fully.

When national elections in April 1994 struck down apartheid, said moderator Suzanne Grant Lewis, lecturer on education at HGSE, the new constitution of South Africa included a commitment to democracy, and, since 1996, "the education policy has aimed to contribute to this new democratic society." Dramatic changes in policy, however, have met with both success and failure, and one cannot underestimate, said Ladd, the destructive wake of four decades of separatism.

"During apartheid, there was very unequal treatment of the races," said Ladd, "and people were put in schools by race operated by 15 different departments of education." Funding across the departments was "egregiously unequal…which changed by the end of the apartheid era, as efforts were made to improve education for the blacks, but separately and grossly unequal."The dramatic changes brought on after the 1994 election included the establishment of a national Department of Education, where norms and standards were set with power given to the individual schools, each with its own governing body, with race removed as part of the standard of admission.

"Let's think about equal educational opportunity," proposed Ladd."During apartheid…spending differed dramatically from the black to the white schools, as did the investment in school facilities." The poorer Eastern Cape, she continued, has "huge numbers of unqualified teachers" and is lacking in facilities, with only 10 percent of the schools equipped with media centers.Teachers on the Western Cape, however, are faced with more stringent educational requirements, leading to a better-educated faculty and a majority of schools--58 percent--complete with media centers. There has been some progress, said Ladd,"but they still have a long way to go."

Still, said Ladd, despite some positive steps toward reform, the "legacy of apartheid" has set the stage for wide disparities in school funding and resources among the provinces.

HGSE doctoral candidate Allistair Witten, a long-time principal and teacher in the South African school system, said his native country has "inherited a legacy of deep inequality. … There was a flurry of policy changes in 1994 and 1995…from the policymakers, with very limited sensitivity to those in the township."

Still, said Ladd, despite some positive steps toward reform, the "legacy of apartheid" has set the stage for wide disparities in school funding and resources among the provinces.Co-author Edward Fiske, an international education writer and former education editor of the New York Times, explained the curricular component of the South African system, citing the critical role it played during the decades of apartheid. With school content controlled by the government, Fiske said, blacks were limited as to what they could study and for how long, as it was considered "immoral" to teach blacks at an advanced level for jobs that they could never have.

"So, when the new democratic government came in, during 1994, they understood very well, as most transitional governments do, the symbolic power of curriculum," said Fiske."This was a way to send out some real signals very quickly that the new role of government and curriculum was a way…of enhancing opportunity, not limiting opportunity."

Despite tremendous uncertainties and notable challenges-- including high student drop-out rates, escalating school fees, and other budgetary and health-based concerns--both Fiske and Ladd agree that the educational story of South Africa should not be a discouraging one, as the work toward progress is still in its early stages.

"You can't go through this whole story without coming away with an incredible appreciation of the importance of history," said Ladd. "History matters. It matters for understanding the racial context; it matters for understanding the changes they've made to date, and it matters for understanding the difficulties for making additional changes."

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.