Brown Bag Seminar: Teachers, Students, and the Low-Performance Trap: Lessons from Africa

Carnoy will discuss a recent study he conducted examining school systems on either side of the border area of two neighboring Southern African countries, Botswana and South Africa and identifying the gains made by learners in the sample with specific teachers and specific classroom conditions. The study examined students in a border region who, like students in many border regions of the world, are very alike linguistically and culturally, yet attend schools that have been subject to different political and policy histories.

Carnoy will discuss study outcomes, which measured learner achievement gains, as well as learner characteristics, the quality of teaching, learning opportunities, and other classroom conditions that might have influenced how much students improved their achievement during their Grade 6 year.

Martin Carnoy is Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. He has written more than 30 books on economic issues, racial inequality, and education policy. His research focuses on the changing economic value of education and on the financing and resource allocation aspects of educational production. His research on educational policy includes some of the earliest empirical work measuring the impact of vouchers and state accountability systems on student academic performance. More recently, he and his students have done extensive analysis on the TIMSS and PISA data, as well as on other international tests specific to Latin America and Africa.

He has also done policy research on high school dropouts across states and on teacher salaries across countries, and has begun to study the links between teacher education and teacher performance in the classroom. His latest books are The Charter School Dust-Up (co-author, 2005); Cuba’s Academic Advantage (2007), Vouchers and Public School Performance (2007), and, most recently, Do Countries Paying Teachers Higher Relative Salaries Have Higher Student Mathematics Achievement? (2009).

Study Overview

In this study we examine differing school systems on either side of the border area of two neighboring Southern African countries, Botswana and South Africa. The children attending school in this border region, as in many border regions of the world, are very alike linguistically and culturally, yet they attend schools that have been subject to different political and policy histories.  The school and classroom contexts are therefore likely to be different in a number of aspects, including the way teachers are trained, the social organization of the schools, including teacher culture, and the way the teachers interact with the curriculum. We knew from previous international tests that Botswanan students perform better than South African students, but we wanted to know why: Is it a question of better classroom and school resources? Or do Botswanan schools use similar resources more effectively?

Our large samples of Grade 6 classrooms on either side of the Botswana-south Africa border in South East Botswana and North West Province, South Africa helped us begin to resolve this puzzle. The two regions have similar cultures, language, and some overlapping history, but because of the vagaries of European colonialism, different educational development over the past 40 years. Our study focused mainly on no-fee public schools in both urban and rural areas and measured learner achievement gains over a seven months period, as well as learner characteristics, the quality of teaching in those classrooms, the opportunity given students to learn the mathematical knowledge we included on the learner test, and other classroom conditions that might have influenced how much students improved their achievement during their Grade 6 year.