BRIDGING THE RURAL-URBAN "EDUCATION GAP": SOME PROPOSALS

Wed, 29 Mar 2000 Source: Maxwell Oteng

BRIDGING THE RURAL-URBAN "EDUCATION GAP": SOME PROPOSALS

By Maxwell Oteng
Santa Cruz, USA,
March, 29, 2000

Recently, there have been oodles of sulfurous wranglings about the state of education in Ghana. And justifiably so! These wranglings have generated many reactions in varied forms including articles, public forums on education, and the setting up of Educational Funds. While these efforts are commendable, it seems that our wranglings have been geared towards the deterioration in tertiary institutions to the neglect of one of the fundamental problems in our education system: the disparity in education in rural Ghana [and certain poor urban constituencies] on one hand, and the urban Ghana on the other. This is because, historically, the people who produce the bulk of our national wealth have been the voiceless majority in national political discourse. There is no sign that this would change any time soon.

No matter how one looks at it, it is wretched of our society that has been paying, and will continue to pay, the price for the educational fantasies of the well-off. Are you probably wondering how? If you are, let me take the pains to explain to you. By government retaining about 40%-50% of the prices paid for the exports produced by farmers (mainly cocoa) and other low-level workers, and allocating the revenues generated from such taxation to fund tertiary education, it means the wretched invariably sponsors the education of the wards of the affluent. In addition, since most of the goods consumed by the poor have inelastic demand (kerosene, matches, "wato nkyene" transportation, etc) they would likely bear a greater part of the incidence of the suggested increment in VAT that would reportedly be earmarked for the Education Fund for tertiary schools.

Not that the GEOGRAPHIC APARTHEID in our society is anything new, but no sector is more emblematic of this situation than that of education. One would have thought that under Rawlingstocracy, notorious for its populist sensibilities, the issue of narrowing the rural-urban educational gap would be brought into national priority bracket and debated. Little did we know that Rawlings' brand of populism was no different from previous governments: its objective was to solidify his political base and win elections.
Why are we, as a nation, not talking about this disparity? Is it not an indictment of our system of social justice to ask students who go to school under some trees in some rural communities to take the same examinations as those who enjoy education in modern or near-modern facilities in the urban areas? Is it not social injustice for students at some rural SSS with dilapidated buildings, no qualified teachers, etc to write the same examinations as students at say Achimota School, Opoku Ware School, St. Augustine's, Wesley Girls', Aburi Girls', Holy Child, Adisadel, Mfantsepim, St. Peters or Prempeh College - the so-called class A (elite) schools? But you never hear debate about this - not even from the National Union of Ghanaian Students (NUGS).

To me that is where the debate on education should be directed. It is a moral imperative that a responsible society ensures that every child must have access to and be required to receive a good pre-university education (elementary and secondary). We must subject our children to the discipline essential thereto. This must be the primary task of society.
In the connection, society's resources must be geared toward the elimination of stark disparities in elementary and secondary schools in the urban areas in one hand and rural communities on the other.
How does our society narrow the "education gap" between the rural areas and urban centers? Obviously, the country should think about putting in place a functional Affirmative Action for our rural communities. There are a number of ways this can be done, some of which have been discussed below.

The rhetoric of self-help

It is inspiring to ask people to get involved in the education in their communities by building classrooms and other structures via self-help. But it is well known that some communities, mostly in rural Ghana, are so poor that they end up not being able to build anything for their children or where they are able to mobilize any resources at all, they erect structures that leave much to be desired. So we see children go to school under trees in some places or in unroofed buildings in other places, and in structures that are more or less death traps elsewhere; in such areas schools have to declare any raining day a holiday for obvious reasons. Yet in spite of these glaring problems, we never set up any special Education Fund to help these poor communities build proper structures for their schools. Would the central government show some courage and leadership and earmark fifty percent (50%) of expected revenue from the VAT increase (supposed to fund tertiary education) for primary schools, JSS and SSS in some parts of the country that are cliff-hanging on the edges of collapse? And would the government devote a portion of the 40%-50% tax revenue it generates from exports of farmers' produce (especially cocoa) abroad to those schools? Is what is good for the goose not good for the gander? It is about time those who generate the bulk of our national wealth were given their fair share of the national cake.

The General Malaise in our pre-university system.

Most Ghanaians apparently acknowledge the general malaise in our school system, especially at the pre-university system. And this is not unexpected because in any organic system, output is functionally antecedent upon input; that is to say, you can only reap what you sow. Thus by feeding our pre-university education system with poor-quality inputs, we can only expect to reap poor-quality final products.
The problems of our education system at the pre-university system can be traced to three sources, namely, the apparent sociopathic indifference of the government to quality education - no wonder [some] members of government who do not want to be a part of their own-created mess send their wards to schools abroad (I expect the knee-jerk shameless Orwellian denial of this stark truth); the dearth of qualified teachers and lack of motivation [of some] of the existing ones; and abject poverty that compels parents to choose between short-term familial economic interests and the long-term interests of their children or in some cases the disturbingly blatant nonchalance of [some] parents in the education of their children (particularly in poor communities). Here are some proposals to address some of the problems in our pre-university school system (especially in our poor communities):

More government Activism

* Obviously with education as a "merit good", and pre-university education in particular as a "public good" (as argued in my first article), more governmental activism in the provision of good quality, and highly functional and sustainable education system is in order and should be expected. The government must ensure that every child has access to good quality education at the basic level (what constitutes basic education in Ghana must be reassessed - it is no longer primary education). In communities that have little or virtually no abilities to provide good classrooms and other educational facilities and structures, the government's assistance must be readily available. It is no so much about building new structures in some areas, but rather revamping and rehabilitating existing school infrastructure. The government can do this if it set up special Fund for rural education similar to the one for tertiary institutions. In Ghana, like most developed countries, successive governments typically spend disproportionately more on universities and other education for the elite. The time has come to redistribute some of this spending to the poor not only as a way of reducing the striking inequality but also to promote faster economic growth. Comprehensive and widespread basic education is more effective in promoting economic development than implicit generous subsidies to the students from richer homes that attend universities. But the question is who has the political will to take the bull by the horn?
Make the Playing Field Level

* It seems to me that to give all students equal chance to move to the next level of their educational pursuits, the playing field must be level for all students whether they are in Pusiga, Ohia Ma Adwendwen or Accra. But as it is now, by compelling all students to write the same national examinations to determine their eligibility to move on to the next level (from JSS to SSS, or SSS to university/tertiary institutions), the field is obviously never level. Those who have the privilege to attend very good schools have a higher probability (all other things being equal) of moving on to the next level than those who attend schools under trees. Any card-carrying educationist knows that both nature and nurture (the environment) are equally important in education. Unfortunately some people (the rural folks) tend to rely mostly on nature (their God-given intellectual abilities) and virtually nothing on nurture (in most cases their environments become a drag) to make it through our school system - anyone that went school in a poor community especially in the countryside can attest to this. This is about equity and social justice. How do we ensure social justice in this respect? The are one of two things we can do, at least. First, we need to put in place a system that reserves a certain percentage of admissions to our elite SSS for say the top 5% of students from highly ill-equipped JSS in certain areas (to be identified by the Ghana Education Service in conjunction with the Ministry of education). Similarly, we would reserve a certain percentage of admissions to our tertiary institutions for the top 5% of students who attend ill-equipped SSS (the so-called Class C schools). Second, as an alternative to the above suggestion, the country may consider running different (parallel) national exams for different schools. For example, based on the classification of schools into classes (A, B, C etc) or tiers (1, 2, 3), we have one set of national exams for schools in class A - the St. Augustines, the Opoku Wares, the Prempeh Colleges, the Achimotas, the OLAs, the Wesley Girls, the Holy Childs etc, and one set of national exams for class C schools like Ahafoman secondary school, Tuabodom SSS, Asempanaye SSS, Sika Fre Bogya SSS, etc. While exams content and difficulty level must be different, a student from Tuabodom SSS with grade 6 must have same parity with a student from Achimota with grade 6. That way the both stand equal chance of getting admission to our tertiary institutions (assuming all other factors remain unaffected).

Provide Appropriate incentives for teachers and supervisors

* Then there is the question of quality of [some] teachers, the lack of motivation of some of them and the general inadequacy of teachers in our schools. We all recognize the importance of teaching as a profession in our society, but we do not give teachers the recognition they so deserve, monetarily or non-monetary-wise. We seem to have the believe that anybody can teach, and given the large pool of unemployed people in the country, we are prepared to cheaply recruit people with minimal or no teaching skills or training to teach our kids. But good quality teaching requires good training of teachers which also requires that our brilliant minds must be enticed to choose teaching as a career, and those trained as such must be motivated to remain in the profession. Have we ever wondered why our students graduating from JSS or SSS choose teaching as an "option of last resort"? How do we attract teachers to our schools especially in our poor communities and keep them motivated? We can do that through appropriate incentives structures:

First, trained teachers need to be paid well comparable to or even better than what is paid to people of similar qualifications in other sectors of the economy.
Second, we should make a conscious effort to make the gap between the salaries of trained teachers and untrained teachers very high in order to give incentives to the latter to get training.
Third, teachers who opt to teach in our rural, remote and poor communities should be paid about 5% higher than their colleagues of similar qualifications in urban areas.
Fourth, institute Teachers Recognition Day similar to the National Farmers day to recognize those teachers who are dedicated to teaching our children. On such a day, not only should dedicated teachers be awarded at the national level but also at the regional, district and local levels through the combined selection inputs of parents, students, teachers and local agencies, etc.
Fifth, institute an annual bonus system for teachers and supervisors (particularly those in the rural areas) whose increment must be tied to improvements in their respective schools. For example, give teachers 50% - 100% of their monthly salary as an annual bonus. Then any school that makes improvement over the previous year, teachers in that school would have their base annual bonus increase by the percentage of improvement made by the school. For instance if a school improves by 10% over the previous years, the teachers get 10% increase in their base bonus. Similarly, a District Superintendent of Education (DSE) should receive a raise in annual base bonus based on improvement in schools in the district under his/her supervision. In this case, for any school that makes say 5% improvement over the previous year, let the DSE receive 1% increase in base bonus, and for any 10% improvement, the DSE gets 2% per school, in that order. In this system of bonus, teachers would have a lot of incentives to work hard to improve their schools because they earn extra money when their schools improve, and District Superintendents would make sure that teachers do their work because the they earn more bonuses if teachers do well. The problem is how do we measure improvement. In the absence of a perfect measurement, we may use national exams score as our criterion (together with other variables we may agree on nationally)
Sixth, institute a performance-based system and give students (and their parents) opportunity to voice their opinions about the performance of their teachers through a national teacher evaluation system. If teachers realize that they would be anonymously evaluated by their students and this could impact on their career development, they would be compelled to cut off the absenteeism, and the lackadaisical attitude to their work - they would be a lot of motivation for them to work. In our school system, the evaluation has mostly been uni-dimensional - teachers evaluate students and not vice versa.
Seven, we must also put in place annual or bi-annual Skills Renewal Courses (Refresher courses) for teachers to give them the opportunities of evaluating their teaching skills and keeping abreast with modern techniques of teaching.

Incentives for Parents.

It is needless to say that in our rural poor communities parents (families) depend on child-labor for support in the provision of daily basic needs of food for the family, clothing and health-care. While parents may, and, in fact do, recognize the importance of school to the future wellbeing of their children, the immediate economic exigencies of the families make it difficult for such families to take their kids from the labor market. Consequently, instead of kids being the classroom to carve a future for themselves, they are pulled along to farms by their families or they bandy around selling all sorts of wares from iced water to dog chains or simply being squeegees. Their parents, conditioned by their present-day economic circumstances, simply do not have the incentives to send the kids to school. Even where kids are reluctantly enrolled in school, their absenteeism rates are comparatively very high. Even in poor families where children go to school, sons are more likely to be sent to school than women because of society's prescribed roles for women in the traditional sex role and gender conformity in our communities. This tends to perpetuate economic inequalities and creates a vicious cycle of ignorance, poverty, child-labor, and dependence because the offspring of these children are likely to be badly educated too.
For really poor parents to send their kids in school and keep them there, let us give them financial incentives to do so. Poor parents should be paid an equivalent or little more than what their children could earn for them if schools certify that their children attend classes on regular basis. To discourage the tendency for families to favor their sons over their daughters, we should pay a little more to families that keep teenage daughters enrolled in school. Such a payments scheme would give incentives to parents to be highly motivated to send their children to school. And the more kids we get educated the more the chances are that we would reduce poverty in our rural communities and reduce the economic inequalities.

Fortunately, this program of paying families to send their children to school has a precedent in Mexico so we can learn from them. In Mexico, the government has begun a program, called "Progresa", that covers over 2 million very poor families in Chiapas and other rural areas. Mothers whose children attend classes regularly, succeed in getting promoted and get regular medical checkups that are paid every month by the central government These payments average about $25 per family in poor communities where families earn about $100 a month.
Obviously such a program is not without its challenges, especially in a poor country such as ours, and with inadequate income data. It would require a comprehensive income and poverty data and extensive cooperation between various governmental agencies and local agencies. It would also require funding. But the issue of funding could be addressed through a redistribution system as suggested elsewhere in this article as well as asking for assistance from international organizations such as the World Bank , UNESCO, NGOs, etc. I see no reason why these organizations would not help; after all they tend to convince us that they are interested in the eradication of poverty in Third World countries and such a program provides a perfect opportunity for them to demonstrate their commitment to that cause.