Teacher salaries must be cut in half

Teacher salaries must be cut in half

Economist Dawie Roodt said that teacher salaries in South Africa should be halved to double the number of teachers and demand higher performance standards.

 

[geezer]

I know sweet jack all about Chemistry, but I believe this to be in the 2nd year's module for the degree:

3.95 g of isopropyl alcohol, 0.79 g of n-propyl alcohol, and 74.18 g of ethyl alcohol to achieve a total solution mass of 78.92 g

However, if you use the densities of the different components to the 3rd decimal, you actually get 100.033ml...

 

[Zellephant]

Are you going to introduce a whataboutism?

No, just a straight up question. Why should teachers be automatically bumped up a few rungs on the salary ladder when they start out?

 

[akescpt]

Don’t talk kak dawie that’s not how real life works…

 

[Nerfherder]

Maybe people should listen more, and be outraged less. This is not a new line of thought from Dawie, he has said if all before, but the emphasis is being put on the "headline" statements instead of listening to what he is actually saying the last few lines of that article is where the important stuff is hidden:

He explained that South Africa spends a large amount on education, but the quality of education is among the worst in the world.

“If you plot this on a scatter graph, you see that our spending is very high, but our quality is very low. We aren’t near the 45-degree line where most countries sit,” he said.

“We spend a lot on education and other items, but the quality is poor. That is the real problem, not money.”

No the real reason is the money.

We don't spend nearly enough. In most cases where we have reduced spending, we have reduced quality.
I'm talking about government schools specifically.... and even in private the teachers salaries are not huge but you get a lot more.

Teachers are leaving in droves and there is a crisis at the moment because something like 60% of teachers are at retirement age so we are about to lose even more teachers.

 

[ghaye]

The problem starts when teaching becomes a job and not a calling. The unfortunate truth.

 

[Zellephant]

The problem starts when teaching becomes a job and not a calling. The unfortunate truth.

And thanks to SADTU/COSATU it has become exactly that - in fact it’s become an easy way into a government job you can’t be fired from, with zero accountability and no performance metric to measure yourself against.

 

[Bad Ballie]

Well, that's not really what he said is it? And let's be honest here, given the level of education and outcomes from a lot of teachers, maybe they do need to be performance managed a little better. Give those that excel increases and keep the rest at a 4% increase level. Teaching was always a vocation, not a career.

 

[konfab]

Teachers aren't the problem

Well what is then?

Here are the relevant sections from the education department's diagnostic report. Specifically on maths education.

Maths literacy is a joke of a subject. It is retarded level. Despite the absolutely pathetically low standard, the education dept claims it is a good thing that only 61% of kids passed at above 40%.If you look at the distribution only 37.9% passed this joke of a subject at 50% or more.

That is either a teacher problem, or an intelligence problem of the pupil body. I do not think the latter is the case, so we are left with the former.







Actual maths isn't that much better, it is still a joke in terms of standards. But it is dire. The 74.2% of kids who take the subject will get less than 50%.










And this is only looking at kids who actually wrote matric. As we all know, that is less than the number who enter into the system.

If we apply some systems engineering to this to see what the problem is: Namely the purpose of the system is what it does.

• Outcomes over Intent: Real-world behavior defines a system's true function, regardless of what people claim it is supposed to do.
• No Credit for Failure: Beer noted there is no use in claiming a system's purpose is to achieve something it constantly fails to accomplish.
• Unintended Consequences: Side effects and hidden incentives often dictate what a system actually produces. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

SA's education system does not produce educated people in the main, most kids who enter it do not leave with any valuable skills. If only 50% of the cars at a car factory actually could drive (let alone be nice to drive), that factory would be shut down by its owners.

What it actually does is two things: pay teachers, and provide daycare for kids. Hence why stating that teachers are overpaid isn't untrue. They are being paid teachers salary for daycare.

 

[konfab]

The issue in SA is poor curriculum, and zero performance metrics for teachers. SADTU has blocked every attempt of the government to institute performance metrics on teachers and the ANC has rolled over and backed SADTU every time despite their own education departments begging for performance measures with real consequences.

Here is solution, dissolve SADTU. Then halve teachers salaries. Then give them up to a 150% bonus based on performance. Average performance gets you 75% bonus, so a smallish pay cut from current salary ranges. Big performance gives you a large raise.

If teachers have no incentive to work hard many of them just won't. I have been actively involved in the education space on governing bodies and believe me, its SADTU that is the primary issue, followed by the ANC and their idiotic policies. The commie ideas of no performance measures that come out of trade unions leads to teachers teaching subjects while they would fail the same exams they pass out to kids. The ANC also for decades pushed failed teaching methodologies like Outcomes based education instead of world class learning approaches despite every expert telling them they were taking education backwards.

You would need to do more than that. You basically need a constitutional amendment to fix education, because schools are simultaneously forced to give an "education" to kids who clearly don't want it and are not able to discipline them effectively.

 

[biena]

The vocation argument does not hold much weight when you have rent due.

 

[Nerfherder]

The issue in SA is poor curriculum, and zero performance metrics for teachers. SADTU has blocked every attempt of the government to institute performance metrics on teachers and the ANC has rolled over and backed SADTU every time despite their own education departments begging for performance measures with real consequences.

Here is solution, dissolve SADTU. Then halve teachers salaries. Then give them up to a 150% bonus based on performance. Average performance gets you 75% bonus, so a smallish pay cut from current salary ranges. Big performance gives you a large raise.

If teachers have no incentive to work hard many of them just won't. I have been actively involved in the education space on governing bodies and believe me, its SADTU that is the primary issue, followed by the ANC and their idiotic policies. The commie ideas of no performance measures that come out of trade unions leads to teachers teaching subjects while they would fail the same exams they pass out to kids. The ANC also for decades pushed failed teaching methodologies like Outcomes based education instead of world class learning approaches despite every expert telling them they were taking education backwards.

Um... but you want the people who mark the papers to get performance bonuses based on how well the pupils do ?

 

[Cius]

Um... but you want the people who mark the papers to get performance bonuses based on how well the pupils do ?

Kids would do independent assessments once a year marked outside the school to measure that performance.

 

[Nerfherder]

Kids would do independent assessments once a year marked outside the school to measure that performance.

They definitely needs something like that but the logistics of that would have its own cost. They only do standardised tests like that twice in the entire school system, mainly because of the effort.
I think the idea of evaluating the teachers is great but its just always going to be problematic.
When so much focus is put on money and a performance metric, then people get stuck on that metric.
For example if you base the salary of a teacher on a single test they will just end up coaching the pupils for the test and not teaching. I remember something like this happening with our Computer Science matric finals, many schools (read private) would get the kids to learn solutions off by heart so their coding finals were all identical. No one had solved the problem in the exam. They all knew that they would get a coding question of type a, b or c and they memorised the pattern and variable names and regurgitated that in the exam.

That's not learning.

 

[Cius]

They definitely needs something like that but the logistics of that would have its own cost. They only do standardised tests like that twice in the entire school system, mainly because of the effort.
I think the idea of evaluating the teachers is great but its just always going to be problematic.
When so much focus is put on money and a performance metric, then people get stuck on that metric.
For example if you base the salary of a teacher on a single test they will just end up coaching the pupils for the test and not teaching. I remember something like this happening with our Computer Science matric finals, many schools (read private) would get the kids to learn solutions off by heart so their coding finals were all identical. No one had solved the problem in the exam. They all knew that they would get a coding question of type a, b or c and they memorised the pattern and variable names and regurgitated that in the exam.

That's not learning.

Not saying it will be easy, but if you have zero performance metrics and zero consequence for bad performance it's just too easy for lazy teachers to stop trying at all. Some people will do their best regardless because they have pride in their own work, others need a stick.

 

[Nerfherder]

Not saying it will be easy, but if you have zero performance metrics and zero consequence for bad performance it's just too easy for lazy teachers to stop trying at all. Some people will do their best regardless because they have pride in their own work, others need a stick.

No, you definitely need performance metrics. Its tricky though.

Have you seen what the education department have at the moment. The CAPS curriculum is a massive workload on the teachers with much of it wasted (IMHO) and most of it just so the department can dictate how things should be done. I think its aimed at the underprivileged schools so that teaching and assessment is done in a more rigid way. For the more functional government schools its just extra stress on the teachers and one of the reasons they are leaving the system.
To put extra load on them with more performance metrics makes you wonder when they will teach?

 

[LazyLion]

Teachers should be among the highest paid civil servants in the land...

 

[warrenpridgeon]

Teachers should be among the highest paid civil servants in the land...

Yep. The future of the country literally hinges on the children of the country.
The old people can only keep it going for so long before they are pushing up daisies.

 

[Neuk_]

Teachers should be among the highest paid civil servants in the land...

Yep, one of the things the high school I attended used to do, was raise extra funds to pay higher teacher salaries than funded by the government, incentivize STEM teachers to join the school and hire extra teachers to reduce teacher to pupil ratio's.

 

[Stinkbeaver]

Yes, I agree with whatever was said about teachers. We don't need them anymore because we now have social media and AI which is making everyone very smart with no effort at all and we even have very reasonable people on this forum with good comprehension skills too.