Thursday - January 05, 2012

Digging Beyond The Headlines

About a zillion blogs and news sites are running this story:

Kenyan Parents Attack Teachers After Widespread Exams Failure

The chairman of the Kenyan teachers’ union says angry parents are attacking teachers nationwide after their children’s dismal performance in a national exam.

Wilson Sossion of the Kenya National Union of Teachers said Thursday that rioting parents have forcefully closed at least 10 primary schools. They are angry that their children failed national exams that determine if the children get into high school.

Sossion says the union is investigating the death of a head teacher from a school in Narok, a town in central Kenya. The man is believed to have committed suicide after the results of all 38 students from his school were canceled over allegations of cheating.

Government statistics show that more than half the 760,000 children who sat the examination last year may not go to high school.

And, given just that bit of info, the comments are flying all over. Blame the teachers! The schools need more money! Tax the rich! Blame Bush! Sounds a bit familiar, right?

The first thing you need to know: in Kenya, if you don’t pass the grade school exit exam you don’t get to go to high school. An 8th grade education is deemed sufficient for many jobs, and that’s all you get. Further down the road, you have to pass the high school exit exam to both graduate and to earn a chance at a spot at university. Nothing I have read has made me aware that Kenya has any kind of vocational education program, as many counties here in the USA do for students who may want to head straight into the workforce in lieu of further schooling. But in the US, even those kids graduate high school right? I think so, but we have lots of schools here. It’s not like that in Kenya.

But is there any more to this story?

Well, yes.

There is a “scandal”; the kids who went to very small, expensive, private schools all did extremely well (Kenyan TV news video report). Is this really a scandal though, when in most of these schools you need to already be a very good student to get in to begin with? Or was there cheating?

Hmm, it seems there was plenty of cheating going on, but I can’t find out if it was only at the fancy schools or not. I only found that nearly 8,000 students in 335 schools had their exams nullified ...

Pupils from 335 schools countrywide had their results cancelled due to cheating, Education minister Sam Ongeri said on Wednesday.

Prof Ongeri noted that senior teachers, supervisors and even parents were involved in abetting the vice.

In one instance, a teacher conned parents and candidates of Sh810,000 in the pretext that he would supply them with Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exam papers in advance. In another case, a pupil had answers written on a sandal he was wearing in the exam room.

Prof Ongeri on Wednesday displayed the sandal as he released the KCPE results. He also showed a shirt with exam answers written on it.

Naturally, when accused of being complicit in the cheating, the teacher’s union immediately announced plans to sue the government for leaking the answers ahead of time ...

Teachers plan to sue Knec over tests

Teachers have demanded naming of those behind the Standard Eight examination leakages that led to the cancellation of results for 7,900 pupils.
Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers assistant secretary-general Lewis Nyakweba and Kenya National Union of Teachers’ Nyamira branch executive secretary Julius Matwere threatened to take legal action against the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) over the leakages.
“We are going to stage demonstrations against Knec for cancelling results of many children in the country without explaining who was responsible and how examination question papers leaked from its custody,” Mr Nyakweba said.

... and it looks like at least some of it was going on in the tony private schools ...

Knec cancelled Standard Eight results for 22 schools, mainly private academies in Nyamira County that were allegedly involved in examination irregularities.

Ok, that accounts for 8K out of 380K; two percent. What about the rest? What really is going on here? Probably less than 1% of the students go to private academies, yet half the kids in the country failed the test. That’s 50 times more than those who failed just because they cheated. Was the test too hard? Was it the wrong test? Is government run public education in Kenya just about worthless? Or are Kenyan students just not capable or willing?

Of course, there will always be voices calling for lowering the bar ...

[from before the exam was given] The 2011 KCPE results were released earlier this week on Wednesday 28 December. According to the KNEC, out of the total 776,214 candidates who sat for the KCPE this year, just under half (48.26%) attained 250 marks and above (the cut-off pass mark out of a possible 500 marks) and only 5,806 (0.75%) scored over 400 marks. Two candidates — a boy and a girl — tied to take the top positions with 442 marks each.

When one considers that an average of 30% of KCPE candidates each year fail to secure a place in secondary school, and the proportion seems to be increasing year on year, it becomes clear that the competition to excel in KCPE is pretty high, so much so that cases of exam cheating have become increasingly rampant with each passing year. This year, some 8000 candidates (about 1.5%) had their results cancelled as a result of cheating and other irregularities.

...

it becomes clear that the time is nigh for us as Kenyans to rethink our attitudes towards the meaning of success when it comes to academics. Students are under too much pressure, not just to pass exams but to excel. The all-or-nothing attitude is part of the reason why exam cheating and leaking of exam questions is turning slowly into a cartel involving not just pupils but their parents, teachers and exam invigilators!

It’s high time for our primary school pupils to be appropriately counselled to know that there is more to life than passing exams, and failing KCPE should not mark the end of the road.

But it just may be that the bar was already set quite low ... and in truth it is the students who are the problem ...

A mathematics teaacher from a school in Nairobi says that his students have such a negative attitude that when asked to worked out the change from a hundred shillings after buying bread worth sh 40, 30% of the students did not attempt while 25% of those who attempted did not get it correct. Not that these students are not able to answer the question but the attitude they approach the test makes them blind to such a problem.

KCSE 2011 mathematics paper 1 and paper 2 on a scale is the most favourable in many years. Paper 1 is such a aper that the current form two student may score 80% which an A. The current form three student can easily schore an A in paper 2.

We loud the KNEC for attempting to demystify the examination by encouraging the student with problems that they are able to attempt.  It may be be what the teachers have been waiting for to motivate students to like mathematics. However it will not be strange to find that most students will not perform well in the subject.

As an aside, if I recall my high school days, I’d say that at least a quarter of the students weren’t really ready for it, and just kind of cruised through in neutral. And that was back in the good old days. Maybe Kenya ought to be proud that a mere 30% couldn’t cut it. And it may also be that not going to high school is not that big a deal in Kenya, I don’t know. In the USA it is. Heck, since we long ago dumbed down our schools to the drooling level, now every menial job demands a college degree, because most college degrees are no better than what a high school diploma used to be. So if Kenya has not yet dropped the bar onto the ground and then dug a deep ditch for it, more power to them. And thus an 8th grade education there may not be so bad at all, really. But what if they have, and even a slow student over here could ace the KNEC primary school tests? What would that say?

So I still don’t have the answer to the big problem. But I do know it isn’t wise to take some of the news at headline value: 11 Kenya exam officials killed in line of duty is misleading in the extreme. Almost all of them had died in car accidents at early points in the year, or from terrorists. Not a single one died at the hands of those outraged parents who are attacking the teachers and education bigwigs. Meanwhile Kenyan parents are locking teachers into their classrooms, and in parts of Africa that is one really bad precursor. Machetes and fires often follow on.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/05/2012 at 02:19 PM   
Filed Under: • Education •  
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