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South Africa: Middle Class Schools 'Left Out in Cold'
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
5 May 2008
Posted to the web 5 May 2008
Sue Blaine
Johannesburg
THE national education department pumps most of the money it has for school funding into schools that serve the poorest 40% of SA's schoolchildren, leaving those serving predominately middle class families out in the cold, says the Institute for Democracy in SA (Idasa).
School funding for SA's poorest children had never been so equal across the provinces as it was now, but the way school funding was done in SA was set to make "middle schools" poorer and poorer, said senior Idasa researcher Russel Wildeman in a report released last week.
"In the poorest provinces this means that approximately half the schools are funded at an inadequate level. Given the permanency of the amended funding system, it would not be an exaggerated prediction that these schools are destined to become poorer and operate at unsustainable financial levels."
This year, levels of inequality continued to rise among less-poor pupils, with some provinces allocating five times more funding to public schools than the poorer provinces were able to, Wildeman said.
The introduction of no-fee schools, which are legally not allowed to charge fees, for the poorest two-fifths of SA's schools had had a "considerable" effect on school funding, and would continue to do so , he said.
The education department has split SA's 26000-odd public schools into five "quintiles", calculated according to the socio-economic status of the school's surrounding community, in order to ensure that the poorest quintiles get the most funding and the wealthiest the least.
The ruling African National Congress aims to ensure that the poorest 60% of SA's children are able to go to schools that do not, by law, charge fees by the end of next year; and, ultimately, to ensure education up to a first degree is free for the poor.
Idasa's study has found that the clamour to get into the poorest two quintiles has resulted in substantial re-ranking, and this has pushed many poor schools into less-poor categories, which means there is a growing category of poor schools that are excluded from the protections provided by the no-fee policy.
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These schools were subject to non-adjustable allocations per pupil and did not benefit from compensatory spending, leading to the worsening of these schools' income status, Wildeman said.
SA's middle-income schools were not upset by the national education department's focus on the poorest of the poor, accepting that they had the greatest need for public funding, said Roger Millson, executive officer of the Gauteng chapter of the Governing Body Foundation.
The foundation is an umbrella body representing public schools' interests and serves many middle-income schools in Gauteng, Eastern Cape, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
This is exactly how socialism works, you overfund the poor with taxes from the middle class until the middle class is also the poor,then you fund the poor with tax from the lower upper class until they are also the poor,can EVERYONE see where this is leading,all in the name of equality,great we can all be equaly poor except of course the party elite.
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