In a country that remains hostage to sky-high economic inequalities when pitted against others globally, the fact that particularly more black middle- to upper-class parents appear to view former Model C schools as the crème de la crème over their counterparts in our townships is the reason I foresee educational inequalities that have crippled our public schools — about 80% of them — will continue to be a dominant feature of our reality for years to come.

This picture is worsened by a plethora of black parliamentarians and civil servants who unashamedly pull out all stops to enrol their offspring in the functional former Model C schools, and hide behind the “it’s a public school” tagline.

Add to this are some of my colleagues in the teaching profession who send their kids to highly functional suburban schools and in turn provide sub-par education to poor black kids in their places of work. I have had the first-hand experience of teachers in the “location” who will bunk or report late for classes, or routinely never show up at work while their offspring are afforded quality education elsewhere.

I have also experienced principals who will prioritise activities that have nothing to do with the improvement of academic outcomes and polarise staff instead while their own children are in intellectually stimulating and socially enriching learning environments. However, things would be different if the socioeconomic profiles of our learners’ parents were different.

Transforming our township and rural schools into centres of holistic excellence, like the rest of the remaining 20% of our schools — serving mainly white citizens and the black middle-class — needs not only political will but also visionary bureaucratic leadership. It will also take the realisation by the growing numbers of our black middle-class population that they are the answer to the resuscitation of our township and rural schools.

If our “black’’ schools had more literate parents, we would draw on their expertise levels and transform them into world-class learning centres. Some of these black middle-class parents possess rare skills that our schools desperately need. Because of their influence in their workplaces, they can easily influence their corporate social investment executives to sponsor a project at their child’s school. Owing to them (black parents) occupying strategic leadership positions in their firms, it is easy for their child’s “white” school to get a multimillion-rand sponsorship deal.

In most of these former Model C schools, their governing body members also hold executive and non-executive positions in various listed companies. I was recently surfing the website of one of the country’s top schools when I bumped into the name of a black university vice-chancellor on a list of its board members. I could hear the sound of my heartbeat at this sight. This is a rarity in most of our township and rural schools.

What would happen to most of our township and rural schools if the black middle and upper class saw them as viable spaces of teaching and learning?

There would be heightened levels of accountability. Because we would know our parents expected better from us, we would prepare for lessons better and not bunk classes. As I have seen over the past years that I have been a teacher, we would not give learners teachers’ guides to write corrections for their peers while we sat in staff rooms spreading lies. We would ensure that we mastered the subject matter because we would know parents could spot incorrect corrections from a distance. Don’t get me wrong: there are many brilliant teachers in our township and rural schools; just as there are many horrible teachers in these former Model C schools. However, we certainly can do better as township and rural school teachers. At the governance level, principals would start to follow proper processes and thereby eliminate favouritism when they appointed service providers.

In some of our schools, because of assumed high literacy and integrity levels of principals, you find parents leaving governance matters in the hands of principals, often to the detriment of the school. Most of our schools simply don’t inspire excellence in many of our learners. This perhaps explains why many experience what Jonathan Jansen calls “academic achievement stalemate”. 

We may be in a new political dispensation, but disturbing sights of broken and unequal educational resources remind us of the long road our black children still have to walk to reach the promised land. DM