LEGAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE IQMS
3.10 Teacher Evaluation in Developing Countries
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the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), the teacher union which represents 220 000 teachers says there is not clear departmental strategy for teacher development and ongoing support, commentators say:
“The quality, depth and sophistication of subject matter knowledge among South African teachers is, perhaps the single most important inhibitor of change in education quality measured in student achievement terms.” (SAHRC: 2006)
Despite the introduction of OBE, many teachers have not changed or have been unable to change their teaching methods to suit the needs of the curriculum.
Although reports reflect average class sizes, there were a number of accounts of teachers having large classes, particularly in rural and township schools. Learner / teacher ratios impact on the quality of teaching and learning that takes place within a classroom. Under these circumstances it is difficult to consider professional development if teachers are not getting the basics right.
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v). The local economy is pastorally-based and communities are nomadic: the economic needs for education are therefore not those of a modernized urban industrial society;
vi) Communities have a traditional (sometimes Islamic) history, where the accepted knowledge, values and skills are passed on orally through the family structure: the social and moral needs for education are therefore also not those of an urban society; and during their travels, nomadic families and their children may cross over state boundaries: systems introduced in one country may be quite different from – and more or less effective than – those in another country for such people.
(World Bank 1995)
The study referred to above found that educational reform in general and teacher improvement in particular in such a context is almost bound – by equipping more and more young people with skills of literacy and numeracy, for example – to be a prime accelerator of transition to a more industrialized and urbanized economy thus reducing poverty. These links between education and the economy are further elaborated on in chapter four. However suffice to say if handled well, that is with due sensitivity towards a community’s needs and values, educational reform and teacher improvement programmes may also expedite the transition process, and have less of a negative impact on the people affected. Reform initiatives, together with research and development projects and their evaluations, therefore need to take these very specific local and cultural factors into account:
“Enthusiasm for educational reform has sometimes preceded the reality… Advocates act as if they can easily foretell the effects, positive or negative, of the actions they promote. This convenient fiction spawns reforms with myriad unintended consequences… Many well- intentioned initiatives have resulted in problems worse than the ones originally being addressed. Only through the careful examination of actual country experiences can the real benefits of many “reforms” be determined.” (Chapman et al, 1997)
Improving schools in developing countries is a continuing concern for the World Bank, which is now the largest single source of external financing in developing countries (World Bank, 1995). Bank programmes encourage governments to give a higher priority to education and educational reform, and the spread of education has helped to reduce poverty.
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Major challenges however remain. The problems in providing high-quality education noted by Lockheed and Levin (1993) are probably still as pressing for many countries now as they were sixteen years ago:
“Schools in developing societies face problems of relatively low school participation in terms of enrolments of eligible age groups; low levels of school completion, even at primary level; and low levels of achievement… their lack of effectiveness is not a mystery, for resources sufficient to provide even the most rudimentary conditions for success are often lacking.”
Even so, the challenges may be as much concerned with designing and implementing the appropriate kinds of project to address the problems of education and schooling in developing countries as with the problems themselves:
“It is striking that none of the twenty-six project designs studied had clear operational definitions of what was being sought for the students’ learning environment, and none included definitions of the knowledge and skills expected of a child when he or she leaves primary school.” (Heneveld and Craig, 1996).
School improvement strategies have been derived predominantly from the western school context, and so how these strategies would work in contexts that are radically different may not be straightforward (Hopkins, 2002). In low income countries the existence of sometimes weak institutional structures creates additional challenges for school improvement initiatives.
Some school improvement initiatives that were introduced in many parts of East Africa in the mid 1980s, included a mixture of school improvement strategies, such as child-centred learning, a focus on teacher learning, professional development and leadership training, and capacity building. However, some of these strategies did not work particularly well. For example, when it sought to promote teachers’ professional development through centre-based in-service training workshops, the transfer of skills into classroom practice was often problematic.
It has been found that ‘on-the-job’ support is more critical, but this also has implications for changes in the work place culture and the way job support is organized to help teachers in their classrooms (Hopkins, 2002).
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Lockheed concurs when he states that:
“It is probably the case that in every developing country there are schools in which children complete primary education having mastered the skills targeted in the curriculum… While there are good public schools, which teach children successfully under difficult conditions, in most developing countries there are simply too few such schools. The result is that many students in developing countries do not acquire sufficient numeracy and literacy skills needed for functioning effectively in their own societies.” (Lockheed, 1993)
There are vast differences between schools in developed and developing countries. It stands to reason therefore that what works in the more sophisticated and advanced systems of the developed nations will not necessarily work in the less effective systems of the Third World. These are economies which are struggling to survive with extremely high levels of poverty and unemployment and therefore the systems that work for developed countries might not work in developing countries. The empirical study showed that what might work in the urban areas might not be transportable to rural areas.