We lived in a society that cannot resist the temptation of racialization, and education is no exception. In an article published in these pages last Sunday, Graeme Bloch writes that less than 5% of black children take the Independent Examinations Board matric, and that the pass rates in these schools are ‘pulled up' by white kids (see here). There are two key assertions here. The first is that 5% of black learners sit for the IEB examination whilst 95% write the public examination. We are not given the independent versus public examination split for white learners.
However, it is common knowledge that the IEB caters for a very small percentage of the population with the vast majority of all learners, white or black, taking the public examination. The second assertion, one that is the focus of this article, is that the success of the IEB examination is largely ‘white' success.
My scepticism about this assertion was aroused by my own experience. In 1996, when I sat for my senior certificate exams, St Barnabas College in Bosmont was still independent and we wrote the IEB exams. I matriculated with distinction. Our class achieved a 100 percent pass rate. Not a single student was white.
It is important to have conversations and debates about genuine inequities in society and in South Africa the main dimension of inequity is race. The assertion made by Mr Bloch would be justifiable if there was significant difference between the rates at which black and white learners pass the IEB exam. The problem arises when we overlook black excellence perhaps because we are too used to pathologising all black experience.
Given that the IEB schools achieve a pass rate just under 99%; even at first glance it would seem unlikely that any demographic skews the outcome, simply because almost everyone passes. All the students who passed also qualified to enter tertiary at one of the three levels, with 85% eligible for bachelor's degree study.
There is reluctance to delineate numbers by race across both the public and independent school system. As an official from the Department of Basic Education put it, those days are behind us. I couldn't agree more. I am ashamed to be racialising statistics as I am about to but this is what our popular discourse provokes us to do.