The decisions being made in the Ministry responsible for education are dissapointing to many a Tanzanian. I suspect the government is too full of old, old men who pretend tightening the purse string to education but ulterior motive is to get trip to India or elsewhere out of country for annual medical checkup.
The Guardian article...
Abolishing boarding schools at our own peril
2009-02-09 10:21:19
By Issa Mcholo Omari
The abolition of boarding O`level Secondary Schools will exacerbate quality deterioration, increase Inequities, and compromise our regional competitiveness.
It has transpired, with evidence, that from 2009, regions have been instructed to select and allocate deserving students only to day secondary schools, predominantly community and ward secondary schools. No schools with Form V and VI will receive Form One entrants anymore. Exceptions are made for the five so called special schools, about 8 technical schools, and 15 designated zonal secondary schools which enroll students with various disabilities such as visual and hearing impairments.
This is a major policy shift, with tremendous impacts, but it is curious as to why it is done so silently, or is it secretly. The reasons given for the shift are two:
First, it is said that the government has no money to feed boarding scholars, given the exploding enrolments.
Secondly, it is said to be a good strategy to open up space for the expansion of Form V and VI where the country is experiencing great constraints, especially for science and mathematics students.
However, both of these reasons are either not true or not strategic enough. First, it is not true that the government has no money to feed its own children, and for that matter, many parents have not failed to contribute to feeding their children. It has to be noted that Tanzania is dedicating only about 19 per cent of its total annual budget to education while neighbouring countries allocate between 25 and 30 per cent of their annual budgets.
Similarly, Tanzania utilizes only about 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product while others are spending 6 – 7 percent of even larger GDP. Thus, it is not an issue of ability to pay for the education of our children but willingness to pay for it. It is an attitudinal thing which is quite pervasive for quite sometimes now. Our priorities are just skewed.
If the government can look for funds to bail our ailing and grossly inefficient parastatals, it can surely also look for funds to give our children good quality education. It is now firmly known or established that many children in developing countries are underperforming because of nutritional deficits. Thus, the state should be happy and keen to ameliorate this desperation. It is very possible for such costs to be happily shared rather than seeing these children as a burden. They are national assets for the future of this otherwise beautiful and greatly promising country.
It does not seem that the national political elite is aware of the fact that, for now, the educational system is suffering from a serious paralysis of stagnation and any policy shifts should be for resustation rather than exacerbation of the deterioration of the situation. The second reason regarding the expansion of Form V and VI is not strategic at all. It is expedience being substituted for good educational principles for educational development.
First, many of our schools are quite small so why not expand them to accommodate more A`level students, and in more appropriate structures specifically designed for that level of schooling. Alternatively, build new ones. In addition, there is a lot of synergy and economies of scale that accrue when A’level and O`level students school together, ranging from sharing scarce resources such as laboratories and some textbooks, modeling and tutoring, to the use of good teachers.
It is now firmly clear that there is a great shortage of good teachers in various key subjects in many countries, and the separation tend to saddle O`level teaching with mediocre and under-qualified teachers who will produce bad products for the A`level tier. Consequently, the good A`level teachers, especially in mathematics and sciences, end up doing remedial instruction rather than their true pitching.
However, the worst part of the policy shift is in the consequences. ll the data, over the years show that boarding government schools outperform all other categories of schools, except for the few Christian seminaries. For instance, in 2007, while 9.70 per cent of students in government secondary schools scored first class, only 2.9 per cent in community secondary schools got that grade.
The differences are basically due to key inputs such as quality teachers, textbooks, but most significantly, time use and nutrition in boarding government schools. Boarding scholars have more time to study.
Thus, the abolition of boarding schools is likely to negatively affect the quality of schooling outcomes which will have serious reverberating effects in all other types and tires of education in the country.
The equity impacts are even more worrying. It was settled legally in 1954 in the USA that different schools cannot be equal so any form of segregation is inherently unequal.
We also know from numerous studies that any school system which relies on community ability and willingness to pay is inherently inequitable since the communities greatly vary, both in welfare and motivations. Thus, children of the poor in their own community schools will never see light of the day as are doomed to perpetual failure.
Boarding schools facilitated cross breeding, and a window of opportunity for the poor to benefit from quality education. In addition, boarding schools were good for national unity and integration as children from different tribes socialised together from early in their lives.
More cleavages will emerge such as rural-urban disparities, religions seminaries disparities, and girls will be the greatest losers as are known to perform more poorly in community day secondary schools. They do their best in boarding and semi boarding schools.
Furthermore, it is self evident that children of the rich and more informed parents will never go to these day schools. Given the emerging rampant corruption in selection and placement of pupils, such kids will go to either the special schools or private ones.
In the final analysis, it is Tanzania`s competitive ability in the region which will be greatly endangered. Our concept of quality education, both at secondary and higher education level, is highly compromised.
Some universities are worse than glorified secondary schools.
Some secondary schools are in the same league—glorified primary schools!! The net effect, in the long run, is to produce poor human resources that cannot compete for jobs in the SADC and the East Africa Community, and who, in the labour market will have lower productivity indices, and thus making goods produced in Tanzania less competitive as well.
Tanzania needs to change and invest in the education enterprise more heavily and reverse current trends which are worrying indeed.
The last point that need to be made here is about the role of the state.
There is a dangerous but tacit inclination in Tanzania, to think that the private sector will bail out the state in the provision of education. This is a dream.
It can only complement but not be a substitute. To date the private sector is small and quite weak in quality assurance and control, resulting in substandard outcomes.
Data, the world over, suggests that education in most developing and developed countries belongs to the state.
One World Bank report in 1995 had the following data regarding state percentage share to the education enterprise: Canada (90.1); Denmark (99.4) Finland (92.3) UK (80.0); U.S.A (79.0) Holland (98.0) India (89.0) and France (80.0).
It was only in Haiti where the state share was 20 percent, but of course no country wants to be like Haiti where voodoo and ``jujumanship`` are more valued than science, technology, and education. Thus Tanzania is only neglecting increasing its share of the budget to education at its own peril. The abolition of boarding schools is surely a strong dose for a disaster. It should be reconsidered soon rather than later.
Issa Mcholo Omari is a Professor of Educational Psychology and Research at the University of Dar es Salaam
- SOURCE: Guardian
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