2.2.7 Strategies for curbing failure rate in schools
Failure rate is another major symptom of educational wastage to be considered in this work, failure leads to repetition, By ‘repetition’ is meant a year spent by a pupil in the same class and doing the same work as in the previous year. It is worth recalling the several assumptions concerning the nature of school learning which underlie the idea of repetition of class and of the pedagogical practices following from these assumptions. It is assumed, first of all, that the study programme that is deemed appropriate for a particular cycle can be divided up into sections, each of which will take a year to teach and a year to be learned by children who have already mastered the preceding section.
The implication is that the sectional divisions are adapted to the children’s capabilities and age groups. It is assumed, secondly, that the majority of children in a given class will be intellectually capable of learning the required material at the minimal rate, as the teacher proceeds systematically through the syllabus of instruction. Thirdly, it assumes that a teacher or examiner can determine accurately the level of knowledge that the pupils must attain at the end of a given period to be capable of proceeding together to the work of the higher class originally, it is assumed that those pupils who did not reach this required level can best be rehabilitated by repeating the unsatisfactory year’s work in its entirety. Certain general practices have followed from these assumptions.
Akindele (2010) In the first place, teachers tend to plan their teaching in such a way that they can proceed steadily through the year’s syllabus of instruction in each subject at a rate which will depend upon the content of the syllabus rather than upon the learning processes of their pupils, of which they are often ignorant. At whatever rate teachers teach, it will always be too slow for some pupils and too fast for others.
In the next place, the pupils are examined at the end of the year, and are divided into two groups, those who pass and those who fail. The former will be promoted to the next grade; the latter may be allowed to remain in the same class for another year in an endeavour to raise their level of knowledge. The examination procedure may be simple and expeditious or it may be more graduated, allowing a border-line group of pupils additional time and supplementary tests before the final decision on their fate is reached. In the end, however, the result will be the same; a two-fold division of the pupils into those who are promoted to the higher class and those who must repeat, if they are to stay in school.
The diversity of promotion practices at the first and second levels of education among the nations of the world is such that, to represent them accurately, each country should be dealt with separately (Akindele, 2010). It is undesirable to expose readers to the tedium of what would inevitably contain a good deal of repetition with relatively minor variations. For this reason the characteristics of promotion practices as they apply to the broad regions of the world are set down. For the sake of simplicity no difference is made between automatic and virtually automatic promotion since we are concerned with the fact of practice rather than the legal basis. There are countries that promote without regard to examination performance and do not permit, except in rare circumstances, repetition of class. It is tempting to seek a developmental sequence among these promotion systems in which there is a gradual progression towards individualized instructional methods which neither allow repetition of grades as a meaningful guidance decision nor employ examinations as arbiters of individual educational progress. However, the situation is by no means as simple as this.
Many advanced European countries employ systems which permit repetition and utilize examinations as part of the evidence towards a promotion decision. It might be suggested that those countries which do not permit repetition have still to demonstrate that they are capable of exercising educational planning to the degree that the internal efficiency of the system is matched by its ultimate effectiveness. It is nevertheless clear that, where promotion is in large part dependent upon examination success, the examination procedures have a restrictive effect on transfer between classes.
It is widely recognized that marks, whether they be obtained from teacher-made examinations or from standardized tests, are expressions of relative value (Akangbou, 2014). At their worst, they are expressions of inconsistent, subjective judgments by teachers on the basis of unreliable, written examinations of unknown validity. At their best, they express the performance of a child relative to the performances of other children of the same age and educational stage, within known limits of error and with reasonable predictive validity for the subsequent class. At their worst, they are haphazard; and at their best they leave absolute judgments as to what shall constitute a pass level to be stated in terms of the proportion of children who shall be allowed to continue to the next class. In neither case do they recognize the continuity of learning, which is not divisible into discrete and convenient administrative packages. Thus, examinations may also be accused of being irrelevant, not so much by their nature but in their conventional use.
Okpara 2006 ( as cited in Okon 2009) examinations are justified only if the information they supply allows one to make truly educational decisions about future action to benefit the individual pupil, of a nature so specific that without them such action could not be determined. If examinations are regarded as servants rather than as masters of educational decision-making they can be beneficial. Unfortunately, they take on their character as a result of decisions which follow them. Only when educational decisions are truly of benefit to the individual pupil will examinations exercise a positive influence in educational guidance. While it might seem that much of the wastage throughout the world could be eliminated by one administrative stroke of the pen, through which repetition was abolished in favour of automatic promotion and drop-out was restricted by introducing compulsory education, it is apparent that these phenomena are themselves an expression of educational philosophy and of economic conditions as well as cultural practices. None of these can be modified easily, and have attempted to demonstrate why this is so and in what ways the countries of the world give expression to the phenomena which they agree in calling educational wastage.
The most convenient way to observe the inefficiency of the system in achieving its objectives is through repetition. Once again its validity may be questioned. It may be regarded as an effective way of ensuring that children have the opportunity to recover from earlier failure and of ensuring that planned achievement levels are met. Moreover the situation differs markedly between countries that have a considerable degree of automatic promotion and those that retain strict class promotion. In the former case, in countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, many provinces of Canada and states of the United States of America where promotion forms the most part based upon age, repetition of classes occurs almost only when children have been absent from school for long periods, for reasons such as severe illness or frequent change of residence (Samuel, 2009). On the other hand, in countries that have promotion standards based upon the levels of attainment that pupils of average or above average ability are thought capable of reaching year by year, the failure rate may be considerable.
When, in addition to Oyetakin (2011) pupils who fail are prevented from leaving school by compulsory laws the proportion of repeaters in each class is high and increases throughout the course of schooling. Despite their questionable validity, drop-out and repetition are the most convenient, quantifiable symptoms of educational wastage and, once adopted, the methodological problems centre on identifying and quantifying them in internationally comparable forms, and locating them within the system. Ideally the data on which measures of wastage would be based would be derived from individual record systems for each child. However, even highly developed countries find this procedure too expensive and the most commonly available data merely state the number of children enrolled in each class in each year.
Recognizable causes of failure rate
Relative poverty
Poverty is recognizably one of the characteristics most closely associated with drop-out and repetition. However, a distinction must be made between relative and absolute poverty. Absolute dire poverty would bring with it malnutrition, undernourishment, inadequate housing, child labour and all that these in their turn entail. Nevertheless the association between poverty and low-educational achievement holds true for developed and developing countries alike; even when the lowest level of poverty in the former might equal affluence in the latter. Although relative poverty may itself be the product of other variables, it undeniably has an effect in itself. The sense of degradation that arises from knowing that in terms of possessions and purchasing power one is inferior to others is appalling, but it is even less disastrous than that which comes from knowing that one’s services are valued by society at the lowest level it permits.
The only recourse which enables self-respect to be maintained is to find a place in a community of like people and to create a way of life and a set of values which are as far as possible independent of society at large. This is achieved by a partial rejection of the values of the rest of society particularly those values which are so remote from direct economic significance as to have little recognizable association with it. They may even be inverted so that status is achieved by boldness in flaunting the rules and conventions of society. Institutionalized conventions are among the most easily recognized and tend to become the focus for antagonism. Schools represent the vested interest of the alien society and in addition stand for that in which one failed oneself and that which threatens to alienate one’s children.
According to Obi (2005) thus relative poverty is more serious as a phenomenon than absolute poverty which can Co-exist in a subsistence economy with highly positive attitudes towards education. Relative poverty can create class differences but is often superimposed on a traditional class structure. In either case, there are formal differences between classes which over generations become embedded in child rearing practices. Language, behaviour, dress, attitudes towards work and leisure, interests and achievement motivation are all affected. All of these may be of vital significance for success in school.
The mother tongue.
Language is perhaps of first importance and a distinction must be made between inadequate mastery of the first language and inadequate knowledge of the language which is the medium of instruction, The most universal problem is that of inadequate mastery of the first language, applying as it does to all countries alike. It is characterized by language which is bounded by the environmental context, by the use of simple rather than complex sentence patterns, by limited vocabulary and by fixed, rather than variable, linguistic structuring of meaning. By the time that children reach school the language pattern is so fixed that it is difficult to modify. Attempts in the USA to improve the language characteristics of disadvantaged children have succeeded only in producing limited short-term gains which have been lost as soon as special teaching ceases. The gains tend to have been in the acquisition of specific vocabulary and in the acquisition of particular symptoms of privileged dialects.
If it were merely an oral language phenomenon which distinguished one class from another it could be regarded as immaterial to learning. However, the intimate connation between language and thought argues a greater importance than mere class distinction. Control of formal thinking is mediated almost entirely by language, the function of which is to act as an internal set of actions which signify entire classes of meaning and experience extensive over time. The dependence of language upon environmental context inhibits the development of this control function of language to such an extent that anticipatory mental manipulations of external events are inhibited. Thus children who begin school with language deprivation of this kind are not merely handicapped with respect to comprehension or expressive language skills but also in their ability to develop and maintain more abstract modes of thought.
Behavioural patterns.
The adult behavioural patterns associated with relative poverty also have effects upon the behaviour of the children even if the adult patterns are not directly imitated. The physical environment generally conditions certain aspects of child behaviour also. Associated with relative poverty is the slum condition of the urban areas with high density living and insanitary conditions. The marked distinction between work and leisure which characterizes the adults is transferred to the children. Once work is finished then the adults seek total leisure in the form of indulgent inactive behaviour. Children are left very often to their own devices without supervision and without a disciplined system of values to guide them. Thrown upon a crowded and relatively disorganized environment which is often dilapidated they turn their activities towards destruction and seek systematic codes of action from their peers.
Thus gang morals supersede traditional morals and the ethic of the peer group is rigorously respected. In the absence of any clearly marked induction process of adult society the gangs create their own induction process which demands proof of maturity through an act of daring. Naturally that which is to be the proof of acceptability in the society flaunts conventional social practice, in keeping with the adult society’s antagonism to the world that has rejected them. Anti-social activities by children are not regarded by the adults as being wrong and the children are more often protected by parents from the public retribution for their misdeeds than made to feel guilty. Indeed guilt is rarely in evidence among such groups. Shame replaces guilt as the penal sanction partly because there is little opportunity to be with oneself in order to internalize social stigma and partly because the society itself codifies its ethic in terms of prohibited practices rather than in terms of personal responsibility to a conscience.
Expressed by Famade (2003), delinquent behaviour is behaviour which conforms to the alienated society’s practices and attitudes even though it is at variance with laws and codes of common practice in society at large. Since schools represent an institutionalized form of the alien society to be exploited they are negatively regarded by the children and parents alike and absenteeism, misbehaviour and denigration of academic values are socially acceptable. To have repeated a grade a number of times may be a mark of distinction which is only bettered by dropping out as early as possible from school. It may seem an extreme set of circumstances but it is all too common among the poor in affluent societies. It must not be thought that all is adverse under such conditions. The social life of a child is very rich, the freedom from adult control permits autonomous activity early and the environment despite its immorality is rich in opportunity. While the contrasts are most marked in affluent societies they occur as frequently in the urban sprawls of developing countries.
Attitudes and interests.
Attitudes towards school are closely bound up with the previous discussion. Behavioural difference springs from attitudinal difference. It is worth looking a little more closely however at
specific attitudes of parents towards school. The parents’ attitude towards school probably had its foundations in their own experiences. Adamu (2000) in all probability they remember school as a regime which was constraining and as involving practices that they never fully mastered towards ends that they never understood, with benefits that they never attained. For some of them, teachers and schools have not changed. The school is a prison like building where one sits in rows, listening and being punished, controlled by people from a different, superior neighbourhood who never tried to find out what one thought or wanted to do.
As parents they have little hope of the school benefiting their children but regard it as a means of taking children out of their hands at the time of greatest inconvenience. Should they ever visit the school they find themselves unwelcome or condescended to. They find themselves unable to contribute to anything the school is doing and have difficulty in understanding a curriculum which does not resemble that which they followed themselves. They have the greatest scorn for the collaborating group of parents who work with teachers in parent-teacher associations regarding them as ingratiating themselves with authority.
Moreover they would like an opportunity as adults to assert their independence from the authority of the school and to insist on their rights whenever the school seeks their permission for out of school activities. Attitudes as established as this are difficult to change, no matter how hard the school staff tries to win co-operation. Indeed it might be said that attitudes represent a coherent body of feeling directed towards a particular set of objects, and interests represent the likes and dislikes of individuals for specific activities or involvement in the situations towards which attitude is directed. W e can say of an individual, that he has an Interests follow closely upon attitudes. Interest in something, if he demonstrates a liking for it either through some preferential decision in its favour or the substantial investment of voluntary time in it.
In the work of Nariochukwu (2007) interest is characterized by desire to know more and by an inquisitive search for further examples of the focus of interest. In so far as the relative poor display unfavourable attitudes towards education and strong pre dispositions to anti institutional behaviour, so their interests follow. It is a common place that children will display considerable knowledge of the different makes and models of cars or spend hours over collections of match boxes and yet show not the slightest interest in the subject matter of the classroom. If interest of this order exists then it is at least something that the school can utilize but among the group we are discussing, consistent interest in anything tends to be lacking. Perfunctory attention to the novel experience is almost the best that can be achieved. Interest quickly shifts to something new; if not a diversion is created which will make it possible. Apathy and restlessness characterize the behaviour of those with low interest levels.
Achievement motivation.
This is determined by the expectation of success or failure, by the benefits of success and by the seriousness of the consequences of failure. It appears that basic motivations for achievement are established very early in a child’s life and have to do with the degree of autonomy he is permitted and the positive or negative responses that the social environment offers. Even at the age of three years it is possible to distinguish children whose basic orientation is towards success or failure. A failure oriented child displays a reluctance to engage in competitive tasks; when induced to do so he tends to be tentative and if he succeeds shows a marked desire to do the same again. But if he fails he seeks various ways of distracting from his apparent inadequacy. He may pretend that he actually was successful or he may accuse his competitor of cheating and wish to control the future operations so that he is successful. The success oriented child is gratified by his success but not unduly so.
When he fails, he accepts the situation without comment and remains relatively unperturbed by it. It seems likely that expectation of failure or success is induced by child rearing practices in which the adult either demonstrates pleasure at success and understanding of failure or unconcern at success and impatience at failure.
In the opinion of Ordu and Usoro (2010) some children can never please their parents and some children never know whether their parents are pleased or not. If such achievement motivation is not well established by the time that children reach school, early experiences in school tend to direct or confirm existing tendencies. Among the children of low income groups, the negative attitudes towards school with which they come are all too readily reinforced by early failure and once having failed it is almost impossible to retrieve the position since avoidance behaviour becomes habitual and there is no longer the incentive to try. The characteristics of children of low income groups described above are not intended to be either indicators of what is universal among them or of what is typical. It is intended merely to describe those adverse relationships with schools which more commonly exist among the relatively poor and which bring about the contrasts with the privileged. Of course many children of such parents succeed in school and many such parents make enormous sacrifices so that their children shall have educational opportunities but we are concerned with identifying the problems rather than with wondering at the triumph of some people over their adversity.
Religious education and conservatism.
Having outlined the characteristics of groups which are either positively or antagonistically oriented towards education it is necessary to speak of the many people whose attitude towards education is neutral, in particular about those large tracts of territory where the population is agrarian or nomadic and for whom schools have no major place and education is on trial. But there may be some traditional form of school linked perhaps with religious teaching which is now either archaic or resistant to change to such an extent that it cannot be utilized by State education (Inemikabo, 2006). Such schools seek to preserve the language, principles and ritual of religion. The studies centre on ancient literature and tend to encourage memorizing and recall as the prime virtues. Literacy may be less important than handwriting; accurate recall is preferable to reasoning.
The teaching lies in the hands of the religious teachers who are themselves preservers of the faith and have had instilled into them the necessity of not departing from the ritualistic practices of the past. It is easy to see why the more modern State education finds it impossible to utilize them. Religious teaching of the ancient style incorporates much of the knowledge of the world as it was and contains precepts which were once wise but some of which are totally outmoded. Such precepts refer to behaviour which will preserve the proper station in life to which one was born, to avoidance of forbidden foods, to attitudes towards physically handicapped children. Outmoded knowledge is also transmitted in which magical explanations of natural phenomena and legendary deeds of gods in creating the universe are directly at variance with scientific explanation. Above all it offers a philosophy which once enabled people to tolerate a hostile environment.
The philosophy may be one of fatalism in which all is pre-ordained or it may be one of unrealistic optimism in which gods are placated by ritual acts. This religious teaching has the authority of ancient tradition, is supported by the elders and has a relevance to everyday life through engrained custom (Oyetakin 2010). It has a vested interest in its own preservation and indeed in preventing change. The teaching emphasizes indirect control over the environment, if not passivity, and contrasts with the modern education for a technological era. For example, we know that in Nigeria some religious groups were apathetic to western education. Among such groups, school enrolment was low and dropout was high. In particular, early marriage which disrupted secondary education was encouraged.