Student success as the number
province. The Mail & Guardian (13–19 July 2012) reports on how ‘the poor lose’, and mentions amongst others that ‘47 per cent of the country’s 12 million pupils are in schools that are funded at minimum levels’ and that less than 1 per cent of grade nine learners met the requirement to get the weekly minimum of four language exercises in their curriculum. The article is based on data that exposes
‘the staggering inequalities in the state of schooling’ in South Africa and draws its data from the National School Monitoring Survey dated May 2012. The report paints a very dim future for the coming generations who will be entering higher education: a depressing context from which to reflect on student success in South African higher education, and on success indicators defined in terms of enrolment, graduation and throughput rates at this stage. The question we need to grapple with is how far are we in refining our tools, both conceptual and otherwise, to deal with these challenges? More poignantly, a critical question is how far are we going to perpetuate ‘structural inequality’ in the new South Africa?
It is this question on perpetuating ‘structural inequality’ that makes me turn to the work of the Aspen Institute in America for a framework that will allow me to look backward and forward in understanding the gains and losses we are making in student success in South African higher education. The Aspen Institute publication on Structural Racism and community building (2004) provides a critical lens through which to view the issues that threaten student success in this country.
The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change, formerly known as Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives is a good example of the ‘collective impact’ strategy that receives a brief treatment later in this paper.
The publication moves from the premise that ‘race and poverty are still strongly linked in America’ and this is 40 years after African-Americans were allowed to vote. The report looks at the census data of 2000 and reveals that ‘a person of color is nearly three times more likely to be poor than a white person’. The publication goes on to focus on a number of questions and argues that these questions matter, and further posits that ‘white Americans remain significantly more likely than racial minorities to have access to what it takes to fulfill their inborn potential to succeed in life, and to be rewarded fairly for their efforts’ (The Aspen Institute 2004). It is within this context that the publication makes the claim that ‘effort to promote a just society and vibrant democracy is not likely to succeed without an honest and unflinching appraisal of the role that race plays in all of our lives.’ The authors advance their argument in this way:
Without fully accounting for the historical and ongoing ways in which racial dynamics produce inequities between whites and
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people of color, the social justice and antipoverty field risks pursuing strategies that are misguided, incomplete, or inappropriate to the challenge. (The Aspen Institute 2004)
They go on to ‘review how race shapes political, economic, and cultural life in the USA, and offer insights for integrating a racial equity perspective into the work of community building and socioeconomic justice.’ I draw from the insights in the Aspen Institute publication and appropriate the integration of the equity perspective in looking at student success and student affairs in South African higher education. I also note that even though there are many parallels, what makes the South African context even more disturbing is that those that are at the receiving end of inequality are the majority and not the minority as in the USA.
The authors use the term ‘structural racism’ to refer to ‘a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity’. Though I find the concept to resonate so much with what is happening in South Africa, I choose to replace ‘racism’ with ‘inequity’ and my appropriation of the concept results in the term ‘structural inequality’, which does not exclude but is not limited to racism.
The authors in the Aspen publication continue to point out that structural racism ‘touches and implicates everyone in our society’. They make a revealing claim and stress that ‘position and mobility within the racial hierarchy, which in some ways resembles a caste system, cannot be determined by the non-white or subordinated groups.’ This claim says a lot in terms of understanding student success and the ‘disadvantaged’, that it is not necessarily within their power to determine a shift in the position they find themselves in. They are somehow structurally disarmed of their agency and a number of factors and role-players reinforce that state. Even more revealing is the point that how ‘those who are at the lower end of the privilege scale perceive themselves, or how they behave, is less significant to their racial privilege status than broadly held perceptions about them.’ At the centre of their thesis is the argument that ‘structural racism’ (to read as structural inequality in the thesis of this paper) provides a lens that ‘allows us to see more clearly how our nation’s core values – and the public policies and institutional practices that are built on them – perpetuate social stratifications and outcomes that all too often reflect racial group sorting rather than individual merit and effort.’ I would like to argue that in the South African context, a lot of role- players that surround higher education are perpetrators of structural inequality, and there is a dire need for a critical look and a seizure of agency to make a contribution and to stop the perpetration. Student success is tightly linked to issues of equity, and at various levels different role players have to scrutinise their
practices and identify how guilty they are of this charge, and find ways to rectify their actions. It is a moral issue.