For many poor South African children, who are predominantly located in the
historically disadvantaged part of the school system, the ongoing low quality of
education acts as a poverty trap by precluding them from achieving the level of
educational outcomes necessary to be competitive in the labour market. An
important question is the extent to which this low quality of education is
attributable to poverty itself as opposed to other features of teaching and
management that characterise these schools. The literature explaining schooling
outcomes in South Africa has reached a consensus that additional educational
resources are no guarantee of improved outcomes. While socio-economic status
remains the most powerful determinant of educational outcomes, studies have
typically struggled to isolate other school and teacher characteristics that
consistently predict outcomes, leaving much of the variation in achievement
unexplained. Several authors have pointed to an ineffable mix of management
efficiency and teacher quality that must surely underlie this unexplained
component.
The National School Effectiveness Study (NSES) is the first large-scale panel
study of educational achievement in South African primary schools. It examines
contextually appropriate features of school management and teacher practice
more thoroughly than other large sample surveys previously administered in
South Africa. Using the NSES data, this paper identifies specific aspects of school
organisation and teacher practice, such as the effective coverage of curriculum
and completed exercises, which are associated with literacy and numeracy
achievement and with the amount of learning that occurs within a year of
schooling. Some suggestions are also made regarding the appropriate way to
interpret these results for the purpose of policy-making