Bill Gates – education experiment gone wrong
Two of my colleagues and I have an ongoing discussion about Outcomes Based Education (OBE).
It came about because I was helping my then-5th grader niece with her homework in general, but particularly Maths. She came to me not having any understanding about how to break down a Mathematical problem first and then solve it.
After 1 term her marks in all her subjects went up a number – from 2s to 3s and 3s to 4s.
To me OBE did not work, because teachers were leaving children to their own devices and if a child had no family member educated beyond primary school or the means of paying a tutor, how would those children be able to progress?
This scenario immediately disadvantages children who have parents who cannot be bothered with them or who are uneducated themselves.
My colleagues are educators. Many of them were involved with creating and testing the current OBE curriculum for foundation phase.
When I mentioned that classrooms had too many children, they once again shook their heads.
Their stance is that teachers are not properly trained to or unwilling to learn the principles of OBE – class numbers were not the big problem it is always slated to be.
They have seemingly been proven right with a school in Soweto with a 98% Matric pass rate in 2008.
And now Bill Gates has further proven that principals, teachers, school culture and the curriculum contribute to a school’s success.
Gates through his foundation, experimented with creating smaller schools.
It turns out that classroom numbers have no or little effect on the way children performed academically.
According to an article in the New York Times, Bill gates said: “It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one,”
“Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.”
Even though I’m still not sure about OBE, I’m starting to accept that the Education Department had to start somewhere since the old curriculum was not acceptable either.
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