Using the hierarchical linear model to understand school production in South Africa

The emphasis placed in the existing South African school production function literature on better skilled teachers and better school management is discussed. Ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear production function models, using 2000 SACMEQ data, for the country and for a sub-set of historically disadvantaged schools, are constructed. Ways of making the results more readable for policymakers are explored. The importance of physical infrastructure, textbook and nutrition budgets is highlighted by the models. Correct allocation of teaching and management time in schools, less learner repetition, and better teaching methodologies stand out as important school and classroom management imperatives.Educational quality, Education policy, Education resources, SACMEQ, South Africa

The when and how of leaving school: The policy implications of new evidence on secondary schooling in South Africa

South African and international household and education datasets are analysed to characterise patterns of dropping out, grade repetition, academic under-performance and under-preparedness for post-school life in South African secondary schools. A number of measurement error problems are moreover discussed and in some cases remedied. The proportion of South African youths entering upper secondary schooling is above the trend found in comparable middle income countries, the proportion entering the last grade (Grade 12) is about average, but the proportion successfully completing secondary schooling (40%) is below average. The data suggest improving quality should be a greater planning priority than increasing enrolments. A what-if subject choice analysis using examination data moreover suggests that successful completion could be greatly enhanced by guiding students to more appropriate subject choices, possibly through a more standardised set of assessments in Grade 9. Any attempt to reduce dropping out must pay close attention to financial constraints experienced by students with respect to relatively low-cost inputs such as books. Teenage pregnancies must be reduced as these explain half of female dropping out. The quality problem in schools underlined by the fact that income returns and test score gains associated with each additional year of secondary schooling are well below those associated with a year of post-school education.Human capital, Unemployment, Earnings function, South Africa, Secondary schools, Examinations, Education policy

Policy note on pre-primary schooling: An empirical contribution to the 2009 Medium Term Strategic Framework

Various data analysis approaches are used to gauge recent pre-primary enrolment trends in South Africa and the level of compliance with official age-grade norms in Grades R and 1. An analysis of the circumstances of Grade R learners finds that large class sizes are a problem. Two separate logit models are used to examine what factors are associated with better pre-school participation and whether participation in pre-school leads to better learning outcomes in primary school.Pre-primary schooling, South Africa, Age-grade norms

Managing the teacher pay system: What the local and international data are telling us

A review of a few input-output models indicates the importance of teacher ability, which may be independent of years of training, for improving pupil performance. A historical analysis confirms the substantial pay increases experienced by teachers in the mid-1990s, moderate pay increases in real terms since 1996, and a falling ratio of teacher pay to GDP per capita. Analysis of Labour Force Survey data reveals that in 2007 teachers were paid less than other professionals, even if the comparison is made conditional on a number of non-pay variables. Working hours is not used as a conditioning variable, however, and low pupil performance levels suggest that the average productivity of teachers is not high. In 2007 the age-pay slope for teachers was flatter than that for other professionals. The impact of the 2008 changes to the teacher pay system are considered. These changes initiate a gradual closing of the pay gap between teachers and other professionals, and convert a rather flat age-pay slope for teachers into one that compares favourably to that of other professionals, and to those of teachers in other countries. The fact that the new system links progression up the salary scales to the behavioural input characteristics of teachers is line with good practice elsewhere, but the linking of pupil performance to teacher pay is probably best undertaken collectively at the level of the school. The teaching hours put in by teachers compares favourably to those in other countries, yet the utilisation of teacher time in many schools is not optimal, resulting in class sizes that are unacceptably high.Teacher, School, Wage Differentials, Incentive, South Africa

What we can learn from a comparison of the schooling systems of South Africa and Argentina

An existing accounting framework to describe an education system is elaborated and used as a framework for understanding and comparing the resource allocation policies of the South African and Argentinean schooling systems. The comparison highlights how, by paying fewer teachers more (relative to GDP per capita), South Africa is structurally forced to deal with relatively large class sizes. Both countries have attempted to use production function studies to understand ways of improving pupil performance, and in both countries the utilisation of education human resources appears particularly important. The economic case for expanding secondary schooling is perhaps not as strong as the policies, especially those in Argentina, suggest. Whilst rates of return to secondary schooling do not appear to offer concrete policy direction, a cross-country analysis that takes into account a secondary school completion ratio (a statistic calculated for this analysis) suggests that more policy emphasis should go towards improving the quality of secondary schooling.South Africa, Argentina, education policy, education financing, school, education, secondary school, educational quality

South Africa’s economics of education: A stocktaking and an agenda for the way forward

The paper reviews some of the existing economics of education literature from the perspective of South Africa’s education policymaking needs. It also puts forward a suggested research agenda for future work. The review is arranged according to five key areas of analysis: rates of return, production functions, teacher incentives, benefit incidence, cross-country comparisons. Whilst benefit incidence analysis is able to demonstrate large improvements in the equity of public financing, cross-county comparisons reveal that not only is quality inequitably distributed, it is overall well below what the country’s level of development would predict. Production functions, especially if translated to cost effectiveness models, can point to important policy solutions. Rates of return are difficult for policymakers to interpret, and need to be viewed in the context of qualifications. Teacher incentives is a policy area that is badly in need of a better theoretical and empirical basis.Economics of education, South Africa, education policy, rates of return, production functions, teacher incentives, benefit-incidence analysis

Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution in Healthcare Reform: A Work in Progress

Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) denotes the problem of jointly localizing a moving platform and mapping the environment. This work studies the SLAM problem using a combination of inertial sensors, measuring the platform's accelerations and angular velocities, and a monocular camera observing the environment. We formulate the SLAM problem on a nonlinear least squares (NLS) batch form, whose solution provides a smoothed estimate of the motion and map. The NLS problem is highly nonconvex in practice, so a good initial estimate is required. We propose a multi-stage iterative procedure, that utilises the fact that the SLAM problem is linear if the platform's rotations are known. The map is initialised with camera feature detections only, by utilising feature tracking and clustering of  feature tracks. In this way, loop closures are automatically detected. The initialization method and subsequent NLS refinement is demonstrated on both simulated and real data

Gamma Rays from Heavy Neutralino Dark Matter

We consider the gamma-ray spectrum from neutralino dark matter annihilations and show that internal bremsstrahlung of W pair final states gives a previously neglected source of photons at energies near the mass of the neutralino. For masses larger than about 1 TeV, and for present day detector resolutions, this results in a characteristic signal that may dominate not only over the continuous spectrum from W fragmentation, but also over the \gamma-\gamma and \gamma-Z line signals which are known to give large rates for heavy neutralinos. Observational prospects thus seem promising.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; revised to match published versio

Thermal properties of charge noise sources

Measurements of the temperature and bias dependence of Single Electron Transistors (SETs) in a dilution refrigerator show that charge noise increases linearly with refrigerator temperature above a voltage-dependent threshold temperature, and that its low temperature saturation is due to SET self-heating. We show further that the two-level fluctuators responsible for charge noise are in strong thermal contact with the electrons in the SET, which can be at a much higher temperature than the substrate. We suggest that the noise is caused by electrons tunneling between the SET metal and nearby potential wells

The costs of illiteracy in South Africa

In South Africa there has been a surge in publicly funded adult literacy education in recent years. There is a recognition that for the effective monitoring of adult literacy, direct measures of literacy are required. Grade attainment, self-reported ability to read and behavioural variables relating to, for instance, reading habits produce vastly different measures of adult literacy in South Africa. It is noteworthy that self-reported values change over time as people’s perceptions of what consitutes literacy shifts. A 75% literacy rate is arguably a plausible figure, though the absence of a direct measure is problematic. An education production function suggests that literacy-related parent behaviour, independently of parent years of education, influences performance of learners in school. In a multivariate employment model, self-reported literacy is a statistically significant predictor of being employed. In a cross-country growth model, poor quality schooling emerges as the variable requiring the most urgent policy attention to sustain and improve South Africa’s economic development. Both microeconomic and macroeconomic estimates suggest that with a more typical level of school performance South Africa’s GDP would be 23% to 30% higher than it currently is.Literacy, Illiteracy, South Africa, Education production function, Economic growth