A percent on paper

I stumbled, as one does, over the 2013 Annual National Assessment results for mathematics: 8,1% of Grade 9 learners passed mathematics with 30% and above. In contrast, 59.1% of last year's Grade 12's attained the same score. I was initially bemused, and wondered what miracle occurs between Grade 9 and Grade 12 to improve performance so dramatically. The first BOOM that hit me was the numbers of learners that must drop out. More Grade 12s pass mathematics because the ones who've stuck it out until then reflect only a subsection of the group that wrote in Grade 9, and that subsection is more able and more supported. The second BOOM that smacked the wind out of me, was the analysis that showed the failure rates of teachers: "Maths teachers were given five simple mathematical tasks from the Grade 6 curriculum... Two-thirds of teachers could answer only three questions, and just 12% could answer all five."*

You could get lost in the stats, and the regression analyses start to become just seas of numbers washing and waving through explanations of how all the pieces of the puzzle don't fit together. I left the seas and started to wonder what this all meant in terms of people's lived experiences. What does it mean in reality to not be able to work with numbers? I asked my mathematician brother, who explained that "trying to understand the world without understanding numbers is like trying to understand the world without being able to read. You're completely shutoff from some of the most important parts of society." He gave me examples of how trying to work out your household's electricity usage, or transport options, or groceries choices, is impossible if you don't have the tools and abilities to do so.

And then I remembered a conversation I had on my last visit to Kuwait in Site C, with a man who runs a business development consultancy. He helps contractors write-up quotes for the work that they do.
"We help them with pricing." He told me.
I assumed he meant that he researches what the market rates are and what the contractor needs to charge to be competitive, or what the changes are in costs of building materials and tools and where the cheapest places are to buy it all.
What he meant was, "they don't know how to make a quote and to add up a quote. They misquote. All the time, everytime."
"So they lose money?" I asked.
"No," he shook his head, "they don't lose money like you say they lose money. They don't get enough money."
I imagine them with businesses that stagnate, not grow, that cut even, only just.
"Shoh, they must really struggle then."
My naivety is rewarded with a very lived experience fact: "they struggle, but it's their workers who struggle more. They don't have money to pay their workers, so their workers don't get paid."

And there's the real BOOM. Failing mathematics in Grade 9 means that you might misquote. It means that you don't earn enough to grow your company. It means that you can't pay your workers. It means your workers don't have money. It means their families don't have food. That what a 91.9% failure rate means.

The numbers and graphs that decorate the pages of the DoE's website and Angie Motshekga's platitudes, they aren't just numbers and graphs. 91.9% of Grade 9 learners did not achieve 30% in mathematics. A clockwise curl, a line, a dot, a clockwise curl and two more symmetrical dots on either side of another skewed line. That's what 91.9% looks like on paper. That's not what it looks like in reality, not at all. Congratulations Angie, for the 8.1%. Well done.


*Charles Simkins, 2013. 'Performance in the South African Educational System: What do we know?' Centre for Development and Enterprise