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It’s all-out war between teachers’ union Sadtu and Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga and her MECs, with Sadtu vowing it will defeat the minister and the executives just as it defeated apartheid, and the MECs saying the union should no longer be allowed to “disrupt” education.
The dispute over the Annual National Assessments (ANAs), which pupils were supposed to write this week, has seen Motshekga and her MECs drawing a line in the sand, determined to stop what they say is Sadtu’s “inappropriate influence” over the education system.
Round two of the battle is scheduled for this afternoon, when Motshekga and senior officials will meet with Sadtu and the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA (Naptosa), where the issue will again be on the table.
A senior education official told City Press that Motshekga was expecting “fireworks” at the meeting.
The battle pits President Jacob Zuma’s administration against Cosatu’s largest affiliate.
In a heated meeting on Thursday afternoon in Motshekga’s boardroom at the department of basic education’s headquarters in Pretoria, a collective decision was made to write the crucial tests in December after a threatened boycott by Sadtu and Naptosa two weeks ago forced the department to reschedule them for February next year.
At the meeting – attended by about 30 people, including MECs, their provincial department heads and senior education officials – angry MECs decided unanimously that the tests would be written this year. They also resolved that it was about time that they “stop the union from inappropriately influencing the education system”.
A provincial department head who attended the meeting and who asked not to be named said those present felt that “enough is enough”.
“All the MECs were equally vocal. Tampering with the assessment is tampering with the core of the system. It is like burning the Bible in church,” he said.
“It is about protecting the integrity of the system. If you destroy the integrity of the assessment, you are devaluing the entire education system. There is no education system in the world that is not assessed.
“What Sadtu is doing is like a coup. It is like running a government without elections.”
The department head also said fears were raised that Sadtu’s move would further erode the integrity of the country’s education system in the eyes of the world.
“We agreed that Sadtu should not be allowed to disrupt the system any longer.”
An MEC who attended the meeting and who spoke on condition of anonymity said: “There are strong feelings that Sadtu is inappropriately influencing education. We felt that we needed to take a stand.”
The MEC said it appeared as if the Sadtu leadership – and not the union’s rank and file members – opposed the tests.
“Sadtu members were complaining because they were ready to proceed with the ANAs,” the MEC said.
Unions fight back
The unions are now taking their fight to the department.
An SMS forwarded to City Press by recipients, written by Sadtu general secretary Mugwena Maluleke and circulated to the union’s provincial leaders yesterday morning, speaks of “war” between the union and the department, which will be defeated as apartheid was.
“We are fighting the ANA announcement by CEM [the Council of Education Ministers] that it will be written from December 1-4 2015. I want you to tell every teacher that ANA will not be written in 2015.
“Tell members that it is the time to respond to the war that has been declared, and stand together and defend our future. We defeated apartheid and we shall defeat this monstrosity.”
Sadtu deputy general secretary Nkosana Dolopi confirmed the SMS, but said there was nothing untoward about it.
“All he is saying is that this is an attack on collective bargaining. How do you explain it differently? The department has turned against its own words. This is education; you can’t turn it on and off like a switch.”
But basic education spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga hit back, saying that “for teachers to compare a legitimate democratic government with an illegitimate apartheid government is just shocking”.
He dismissed Sadtu’s insistence on postponing the tests to February as “bankruptcy of the highest order”, arguing that the department and the unions had agreed to shelve the administration of the tests for 90 days. In the meantime, the department had appointed a team of experts to reconfigure and revamp the tests.
Dolopi said the “fight was between those who take the education of our kids seriously and those who don’t”.
“No normal educationist will subject our learners to that. November is set aside for exams and, after a gruelling month of exams, you want to subject learners to this? The credibility and reliability of the tests will come into question. How do you subject learners to tests after exams? Teachers will be marking scripts and preparing reports.”
He said the department’s insistence that the tests go ahead was to do with the R200 million already set aside to administer them, and not about their value.
Naptosa general secretary Henry Hendricks said that although the union supported a systemic evaluation, the tests in their current form had deviated from their original purpose and “are now used to measure schools against schools and districts against districts”.
The union, he said, was shocked by the department’s unilateral decision to conduct them in December.
“We jointly agreed that we will revamp it and relaunch it in February. We don’t want to say we are against the December dates. We want to hear the logic behind the unilateral decision.”
The senior department official said the department had announced earlier this year that it would appoint a team to review the tests, looking into their “frequency, quality and comparability over years”.
“MECs felt that the postponement will not be in the interest of the system and the children.”
Motshekga introduced the ANAs in 2011 to test pupils’ understanding of their work, especially in maths and literacy. In 2013, the results revealed that only 3% of Grade 9 pupils scored above 50% in both literacy and maths assessments.
In 2012, only 2% had made it above 50%. The assessment has also revealed that by the time pupils reach Grade 5, they have massive and almost irreversible gaps in their learning.
Politically motivated battles
A senior departmental official who attended Motshekga’s meeting said those present discussed revelations by a senior Sadtu official at a gathering in Cape Town last week that Sadtu was using the tests to “stamp its authority” on the system.
“They said they didn’t want to create another Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu),” he said, referring to how Amcu was born as a result of how the Nation Union of Mineworkers (NUM) conducted itself.
Sadtu, he said, wanted to defend its territory against its former president, Thobile Ntola, who is believed to be planning the launch of another union in the sector.
Sadtu is now Cosatu’s largest union after metalworkers’ union Numsa was expelled and the NUM went into decline.
The provincial department head confirmed this.
“It is all political. They just want to stamp their authority, but they are doing it the wrong way. They touched a raw nerve and they are now on the back foot. It is just like the NUM and Amcu.”
Dolopi strongly denied that Sadtu feared the creation of a rival union and was acting accordingly.
“We are doing this in the interest of education,” he said.
