Picture a subsistence-level village where poverty shapes daily life. Goats and cattle wander freely across dirt roads. Hand-built rondavels—round mud huts—provide shelter. There are no flush toilets, and there is scant electricity. There are few clocks in the village huts, which can make getting to school on time a challenge. Often, few adults are to be found. Many of them are away for most of the day or for months at a time, working or seeking work in nearby towns, which often are not nearby at all.
In villages like this in rural South Africa, school principals and other school leaders carry their nation's hope for transforming the education system. It would be easy under these circumstances for principals to throw up their hands in despair or blame the department of education and leave it at that. The principals in these villages are doing something else. As participants in a two-year program leading to an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) in school management and leadership, they are seeking ways to identify solvable problems, build on their strengths, and support and empower their educators, their learners, and, in many ways, their communities.
The ACE Program
In fall 2007, during a sabbatical leave in Pretoria, South Africa, I had the opportunity to observe a first-of-its-kind professional development program for principals and other school leaders working in rural South Africa. As one of five universities offering a pilot program developed by South Africa's Department of Education, the University of Pretoria admitted 100 school leaders into the two-year ACE program in school management and leadership. Fifty participants are principals in the province of Limpopo, and 50 are members of senior management teams—which include the principal, deputy principal, and department heads—in Mpumalanga, another province.
These school leaders have not had the kind of professional development we take for granted in the United States. Until now, no credentialing process existed for becoming a principal in South Africa. Before 1994, all South Africans were educated in accordance with apartheid. These principals, who taught in schools for blacks and coloreds, were not groomed for leadership or even provided with a solid high school education.
Now, however, by the end of their two-year ACE program, the school leaders will have attained the equivalent of a four-year college degree. The national minister of education has set a goal of training all school principals in South Africa by 2011 and of making a degree a baseline qualification. "The challenge is to get schools that have not been functioning to function," said Ben Badenhorst, one of the mentors working with the ACE program. To a large extent, that challenge rests on the principals' shoulders.
The ACE program curriculum, spread over four semesters, includes coursework on education management and leadership, education law, leading and managing people, managing teaching and learning, and managing physical and financial resources. Some of the university's most senior faculty teach in the program. Students complete portfolio and research projects and must demonstrate competence with computers. They also must demonstrate proficiency in English, which for many South Africans is their third or fourth language.
The 100 students in the pilot program leave their schools every other Friday afternoon to travel to Pretoria. From some parts of Limpopo, this is a five-hour bus trip. They spend the following day in classes and small-group sessions, returning to their homes at the end of the day. Each principal or school leader is paired with a mentor, who facilitates a small-group discussion after each set of university lectures and regularly visits the program participant's school to observe and offer support.
All the mentors, now retired, are former principals of successful Model C schools, which served only white students under Apartheid. These schools still have more resources and better facilities than other South African public schools. Mentors need to make an experiential leap because knowing how to run a school with adequate funding and few infrastructure problems does not easily translate into knowing how to run a school in a remote village where subsistence-level poverty is the norm.
What Principals Are Up Against
A 2006 assessment of the infrastructure of South Africa's public schools found that almost 10 percent of the 4,037 schools in the province of Limpopo (which is not the poorest of South Africa's nine provinces) have no source of water at or near the school, and almost 30 percent depend on boreholes or rainwater harvesting systems they devise themselves. Most of the schools in the province have toilets, but 40 percent of them are pit latrines. Nine percent of the schools have no electricity, 84 percent have only gravel road access, and 73 percent depend on cell phone reception because there are no land lines. Thirty-seven percent of the schools in Limpopo have more than 30 learners per classroom; 25 percent have more than 45 learners. Ninety-three percent of the schools have no library space, 82 percent have no computers, and 87 percent of the secondary schools have no science lab. Fewer than 4 percent of the 1,338 secondary schools in the province have science labs that are stocked.
To better understand the schools and regions in which these educators worked, I accompanied Ben Badenhorst on a four-day trip to Limpopo, where we visited four schools and met with their principals.
Food and Books
The first school, a primary school in the village of Burgersfort, serves 635 learners. School starts early, at 7:30 a.m., because it is often so hot by noon that no one can concentrate. Many learners come early to do chores, including sweeping the school yard and fetching water from a tank, which the municipality periodically fills. The school day begins with a morning assembly that includes singing, a Bible reading, and a welcome from the principal. The students then walk to their rooms, class by class.
When a bell rings, students come out to stack the sticks they bring each day to help fuel the fire. Kettles over an open fire constitute the school's "feeding scheme"—the rough equivalent of a school lunch program. Women volunteers from the village prepare and serve the food each school day at 10:00 a.m. For many of the learners, this is their only meal for the day. They bring plates from home and heap them full.
The principal greeted us warmly when we arrived and spoke enthusiastically about a Read-a-Thon she had organized that drew in the whole community. The learners read before a large audience. Parents brought food, and a cow was slaughtered for the occasion.
A Hard Climb Up
Our next stop, a secondary school in the village of Topanoma, sits on top of a hill. It is accessible only by foot or a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The terrain is not conducive to planting a garden or creating a field for soccer, which is a popular sport. This is especially unfortunate for a secondary school; a sports program could attract teenage boys in much the same way that a good meal attracts the younger learners. When it rains, the students must walk barefoot up the muddy hill, often on empty stomachs. Here, too, a tank provides water for the school. The school's one computer is broken, as is the copy machine.
When we visited, the school principal had just gotten some furniture for her office and proudly displayed a trophy received several years ago when the school was named "most improved" after student matric pass rates (equivalent to a 12th grade exit exam) jumped from 0 to 15 percent. The pass rates continued to rise thereafter, but dropped back to 43 percent last year. Although the school, which serves 420 learners, should have 21 educators on the basis of its enrollment, it has only 14—a major source of frustration for the principal.
The Gift of a Garden
The third school, a primary school in the village of Nkomo, serves 1,176 learners. It has a large, well-tended garden subsidized by the Department of Agriculture. The harvest helps feed the learners, and the school also sells some of the vegetables to raise funds. Fourteen plots have been allocated to the poorest families in the community. As Badenhorst noted, this garden "feeds a lot of mouths." When we visited, spinach and beets were plentiful, but red spiders had wiped out all the tomatoes.
Through Grade 6
The fourth school is in the village of Mahlava, about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from a tarred road. Learners greeted us when we arrived and took our parcels to carry. This school has a computer room and offers computer classes to the community but has no Internet access. The school walls display many awards and certificates of appreciation, along with an HIV/AIDS policy statement and an informational poster about how to detect and treat malaria. Both diseases are real threats. "We have many orphans; the parents are dying," the principal told me. The HIV/AIDS policy affirms learners' rights to attend the school as long as they can and, if they cannot come to school, to receive help with work at home.
The school runs through grade 6. Learners who continue on must walk to a secondary school in another village—an hour away through the bush. There is no connecting road. This trek is fraught with danger: rape (a serious problem in South Africa) and other crimes, as well as attacks by buffalo and lions that escape when poachers drive over the fence surrounding nearby Kruger National Park. "The secondary-age learners get tired of going," the principal said, "so they stay home, have children, and collect the social grant of 200 rand (approximately $28) a month. It is painful."
A Sobering Reality
The lecturers and mentors in the pilot ACE program are trying to provide a solid, practical school-management curriculum grounded in these realities. The challenges are overwhelming, however. They include subsistence-level poverty, child-headed families, parent illiteracy, transportation and communication difficulties or impossibilities, educators who don't know how to prepare lessons or lack commitment to their work, and inadequate staffing, which results in large class sizes with multiple grade levels in the same room. Said one principal, "I had to teach 150 learners under a tree." Few learners in these villages end up attending a university. The lack of an opportunity structure is perhaps the greatest challenge of all.
The principals discussed a host of issues during the campus lectures and mentoring sessions I attended. All the principals teach, some as many as five out of six periods each day. Many travel a long way to get to their schools, leaving home in the early hours of the morning. None have secretaries, and most of their schools do not have all the educators to which they are entitled.
The principals had several immediate concerns. District education officials schedule mandatory training during the school day with little notice, which disrupts principals' plans and sometimes leaves learners without an educator. Communication up the education hierarchy is difficult. Educators are teaching content in areas for which they are not qualified, and they do not always prepare lessons as they should. Too many leave early to catch a minibus taxi, which many South Africans rely on for transport. Many educator positions remain unfilled. Newly appointed educators are sometimes not paid for months. Parents show up at the school without an appointment and expect attention, and school buildings cannot accommodate all the learners.
Lecturers and mentors responded in a variety of ways. They shared wisdom from their own experience. Badenhorst told one principal, "You must be able to say no" to visitors who show up at the school unannounced. "Bring in the taxi driver, if you need to, and agree on a plan," he told another principal who was struggling with educators who left early. Participants brainstormed ideas; one principal advised another to require her educators to plan lessons together and submit the plans periodically. They acknowledged problems even when no solutions were readily apparent. For example, a national shortage of science and mathematics teachers has hit hard in rural areas, many educators' last choice of a place to work. Finally, lecturers and mentors repeatedly encouraged the principals to see themselves as leaders, as capable and accountable despite the stunning lack of resources.
Making the Most of Little
The long distances between schools, poor-quality dirt roads, and heavy teaching schedules make networking difficult. The principals participating in the program truly appreciated the opportunity to interact with colleagues. One principal told me that she now believes she has direction and a vision, and she knows where her school is headed.
Although these principals are only now receiving formal training as administrators, they are already community leaders. The Read-a-Thon that the principal organized at the primary school in Burgersfort drew in the whole community. The showplace school garden in Nkomo, thanks in large part to the principal, feeds many mouths. The principal in Mahlava has opened her school's computer room to the community and is trying to get the school extended to grade 8. This would give older students access to a few more grades of schooling—an option preferable to having students make the dangerous journey on foot to a school an hour away.
After visiting the schools in Limpopo, observing the classes at the university, and talking with some of the lecturers and program coordinators, I can only cheer—for the principals, who are trying so hard to make the most of the precious little they have in the way of material resources and set their schools on positive courses; for the mentors, who are sharing their expertise to support colleagues wrestling with often insurmountable challenges; and for the university team, which is trying to build management and leadership skills, brick by figurative brick, in a way that is financially sustainable over the long haul and that will make a difference in the nation they love.
