Abstracts

93 investigate the two-year to three-year teacher training programs in order to fully grasp the quality of the teacher labor pool within South Africa. Insufficient teacher training within South Africa is a significant contributing factor to the country’s poor educational performance. According to a study conducted by the nonprofit JET Education Services, there are substantial problems within education training: “Three out of five of the Higher Education Institutions that were sampled provided no English language, literature, or linguistic education for teacher trainees not specializing in this subject, despite poor English language proficiency among teacher trainees being a ubiquitous concern” (Robinson, 2019). This finding demonstrates a violation of the constitutional promise that instruction will occur in all official languages, respecting the parent’s choice to designate the language in which their child will be taught. This is a real concern, especially given that on average 62% of South African teachers teach in a classroom where, at minimum, 10% of their students speak a first language that is different from the language of instruction. This is the highest percentage of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development country or partner (“5 Of the Biggest Problems…,” 2019). The government administration is failing to adhere to basic rights as outlined in the constitution by not prioritizing this important factor within the teacher training curriculum. In addition to concerns regarding the language of instruction, teachers are ill prepared for basic studies they themselves are expected to teach. When comparing South African performance to other countries in the region, Spaull found that between 1994 and 2011, grade six mathematics teachers had similar levels of content knowledge to the average teacher in developing countries, such as Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi, and had substantially lower content knowledge than teachers in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Tanzania. Similarly, ruralmathematics teachers in South Africa had significantly lower levels of content knowledge than rural mathematics teachers in Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya (Spaull, 2013b). Even more strikingly, a 2007 study found that 79% of South African mathematics teachers for 11 and 12 year olds scored below the level expected of their own students; the test included simple calculations of fractions and ratios (Spaull, 2013a). This sort of discrepancy raises the question as to how the South African Department of Basic Education (DBE) can expect students to learn and perform when their teachers are not competent in the material they themselves are expected to teach. Teacher Placements Another fundamental issue is the failure of school administrators to place teachers in positions that match their skills and training. Teachers are trained in specific phases of learning, including the Foundation Phase, Intermediate Phase (IP), and Senior Phase. (For comparison, these phases are similar to elementary, middle, and high school levels within the United States.) According to the study conducted by JET Educational Services, “Among 776 NQTs, newly qualified teachers, in their first year of teaching in 2014, 189 found themselves teaching in the IP, although almost two thirds of these had not specialized in this phase” (Deacon, 2016, p. 16). Clearly, there is a lack of organization within the education system in which teachers are not being matched according to their level of training. This is an inefficient way of placing teachers properly, resulting in students being taught by a less than qualified educator. Not only is this misplacement an issue in terms of age specifications but also there is a lack of connection between the academic subjects that teachers specialize in during training and what they end up teaching. Of the same 776 newly qualified teachers, “over two-fifths of the English specialists and more than a quarter of the Mathematics specialists were not teaching those subjects, even while these subjects were being taught by non-specialists at other schools” (Deacon, 2016, p. 16). It is evident that school governing bodies are not assigning teachers into appropriate positions, which in turn diminishes teachers’ ability to properly educate their learners. The consequence of inadequate and ineffective teacher training and placement is that it further diminishes the teaching