We are often reminded that South Africns are on the bottom rungs of world maths education, by some estimates beating only Yemen. This does not tell the whole story.
Rounding out the numbers, around 1.6 % of South African learners get a distinction for Grade 12 Maths (8 000 out of 500 000). This compared to UK GCSE where 3% of learners get a distinction. However our NSC Grade 12 Maths exam is a level more difficult than GCSE including areas of financial maths, statistics and calculus.
What is interesting is that when you examine Private Schools in South Africa, the distinction rate jumps closer to 20% at top schools. Far from producing the worst results, South African private schools produce closer to the best maths results in the world. The result is that 15% of top University entrants come from IEB schools. Maths distinction graduates are nearly fully employed whereas the national average of young unemployed is over 50%.
The limiting factor is the quality of teachers and the access to technology. Quality teachers are hard to come by and will always be a limiting factor. However an opportunity awaits us. Adopting technology should be a priority. Machines simply make better maths teachers. We have the opportunity that in more developed countries the maths teachers unions are more militant and resist replacing human teachers with machines. Ironically the second worst country in the world is best placed to do this. Small studies are already showing that access to broadband video and deep learning techniques can raise the distinction rate dramatically. Machines are tireless and almost unlimited in productivity. A determined roll out of maths teaching technology can raise our distinction rate ten fold.
That is why at the Copeman Academy we put our emphasis on Creative Commons and AI Pattern recognition. So far so good. We have a 100% distinction success rate.
