The Department of Basic Education (DBE) and an education researcher dispute the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranking of SA's maths and science education as the worst in the world.
The WEF's 2015 Global Information Technology report, released yesterday, condemned SA's education system, and showed the country has again dropped in its Network Readiness Index.
However, the DBE has called out the WEF for not considering the broader view of government's education initiatives. "The WEF researchers have not made an effort to refer to any of the ICT initiatives we have launched, such as the Ukufunda Virtual School, our ICT centres, and various e-learning programmes that form part of our broader ICT in education strategy," says spokesman Elijah Mhlanga.
"If the researchers had contacted the department, we would have gladly taken them through the current policies, plans and programmes with regard to ICT in education... The researchers seem to target countries that have made information available and therefore make conclusions on the basis of what they could access and that is problematic.
"This looks like an opinion piece by the WEF on the state of ICT in education across the world," comments Mhlanga.
Education researcher Nicholas Spaull, a postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University, agrees, saying the methodology behind the ranking is "subjective and unscientific".
SA was ranked 143 out of 143 countries for the quality of its maths and science education alone, and ranked 139 for the overall quality of its education system. To get to these rankings, the WEF asked between 30 to 100 business executives in each country to answer questions, relating only to their own country, and used a scale of one to seven to record their perceptions ? with one being extremely poor and seven excellent.
Spaull says the methods used to calculate the rankings within the report are "subjective, unscientific, unreliable and lack any form of technical credibility or cross-national comparability.
"Business executives in countries are asked about their perception of the education system within their own country and not to compare the system to other countries' systems, which could yield very different results and 'perceptions'."
Spaull does not dispute that the South African schooling system is in crisis, or that it performs "extremely" weakly relative to other low- and middle-income countries. "These 'rankings' should not be taken seriously by anyone or used as evidence of deterioration," he says, noting this is a point he made last year and the year before.
He points out that if other countries' rankings are looked at and compared, the "egregiousness" of the WEF's methodology starts to show. "How is it possible that the quality of maths and science education in failed states such as Chad (ranked 127) and Haiti (124) is better than modernising middle-income countries such as Brazil (131th) and Mexico (128st)?"
Share