The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its Global Information Technology Report 2016, which ranked South Africa last in mathematics and science education quality. However, the methodology behind the survey has been controversial.
In the MyBroadband article, ‘South Africa finishes last in WEF’s 2016 mathematics and science education ranking‘, the following points were noted.
- The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released its Global Information Technology Report 2016, which ranked South Africa last in mathematics and science education quality.
- South Africa also finished close to last – 137 out of 139 countries – when looking at the overall quality of its education system.
- This is the third year in a row that South Africa has finished last in the World Economic Forum’s mathematics and science education quality rankings.
However, the WEF survey has been criticised by experts
Education expert Nic Spaull explained the mistakes in his Mail & Guardian article ‘Education rankings: There’s madness in WEF methods‘.
Let me cut to the chase and say, unequivocally, that the methods used to calculate these education rankings are subjective, unscientific, unreliable and lack any form of technical credibility or cross-national comparability. I am not disputing that South Africa’s schooling system is currently in crisis (it is), or that South Africa performs extremely weakly relative to other low- and middle-income countries (it does). What I am disputing is that these “rankings” should be taken seriously by anyone or used as evidence of deterioration (they shouldn’t).
Martin Gustafsson, one of the researchers at RESEP looked into the WEF rankings on education and discusses some salient features which explain why the WEF rankings on education are especially problematic:
1. The 2013-2014 report does not really present anything new. Figures in reports from earlier years are very similar.
2. With regard to the educational quality indicators, it is important to bear in mind that the WEF does not make use of any standardised testing system in producing its report. Instead, it makes use of an expert opinion approach. One would expect the South African respondents to rate the quality of South Africa’s schooling poorly for a number of reasons.
3. With regard to the primary enrolment ratio, it is important to note that UNESCO’s enrolment ratios (the data source for the WEF) are widely regarded as problematic and often not amenable to useful international comparisons due to the fact that UNESCO calculates its ratios using official enrolment totals and official population totals, in other words information from very different data sources. In South Africa, total population figures for children are simply too high compared to the enrolment totals. In most developing countries, the problem is that enrolment totals are inflated. South Africa’s enrolment ratios in the UNESCO reports appear to be relatively poor, but this means nothing and has confused a lot of people.
Read more: https://nicspaull.com/2014/06/05/wef-education-rankings-are-nonsense/