Gcobani Mndini, a shy, lanky 17-year-old, said he was already a gangster by the time he started ninth grade. His small gang, which called itself the Tomatoes, was robbing people, fighting over girls and getting high on Jack Daniel’s and marijuana.
“I joined the gang because I wanted to belong,” he said.
He has since found that he fits in the last place he might have expected — at a private high school that is reinventing education for teenagers from South Africa’s black townships.
Gcobani quit gang life and has emerged as a talented science student seeking admission to the country’s finest universities.
A teacher recently looked in on a class of students studying late on a weeknight and asked: “Everything good?”
Gcobani gave a thumbs up.
As many of South Africa’s public schools have failed a post-apartheid generation of children from poor townships and rural areas, a budding movement of educators, philanthropists and desperate parents is increasingly searching for alternatives.
For a decade, banks and foundations here have sponsored promising township students to attend elite, mostly white schools. However, now new private schools are springing up to serve poor and working-class black children, giving the still dominant public system some newfound competition and perhaps even devising models that will end up influencing it.
The 500 students at three schools known as Leap, represent one approach. All of the students, including Gcobani, come from black townships. They are immersed in an educational environment that is reminiscent of some of the most successful US charter schools.
In another undertaking, civic leaders are trying to revive the rural mission schools that educated many of South Africa’s liberation heroes, but were largely destroyed by apartheid-era laws that required the institutions to submit to a racist system’s dictates or surrender control to the state. Former South African president Nelson Mandela’s alma mater, Healdtown, and the Inanda Seminary, the nation’s first high school for African girls, founded by US missionaries in 1869, are among those to be restored.
In a small platinum-rich dominion near Johannesburg, the king of the Bafokeng people, Leruo Tshekedi Molotlegi, has built a US$72 million private school for 800 children, most of whom will be local boys and girls on scholarship.
However, a growing number of families, even without philanthropic support and tired of what they see as unmotivated public school teachers, are scraping together money on their own to send their children to bare-bones private schools tucked away in abandoned factories, shopping centers, shacks and high-rises, a new study of rural and urban communities in three provinces found.
In fact, researchers discovered far more of these low-fee private schools than official statistics suggest and surprisingly noted that public school teachers dissatisfied with their own workplaces were among the parents of students in these schools. While national studies are needed to gauge the full scope of the phenomenon, the researchers said, the evidence suggests that such schools are increasingly popular.
“Some ask, ‘Why aren’t parents screaming about the appalling state of public education?’” said Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Johannesburg-based Center for Development and Enterprise, which conducted the study. “They’re moving with their feet.”
At the Leap schools, students have extended classes during the week, from 8:15am to 5:15pm, and they attend on Saturday mornings. They spend extra time on math, science and English. Seniors preparing for the matriculation examinations that will shape their futures stay until 8pm three nights a week.
However, the schools instill more than a fierce work ethic. Each day, students have a life orientation class, or LO as they call it, where they talk about the personal problems that can derail an education — a stepfather who expects a girl to clean house rather than do her homework, a student trying to study in the shack where her family lives and runs a saloon and another student who goes to school hungry because her mother’s salary as a maid runs out before the end of the month.
After a year of denying that he was in a gang, Gcobani said it was only in LO that he began facing the consequences of his choices, even though his township friends were dying in knife fights.
“Sometimes, the whole class would confront him,” his classmate Lucinda Plaatjie said.
The one-two punch of academic rigor and emotional honesty has paid off. Leap students have far outperformed the national average on matriculation exams. Nine out of 10 have passed the exams over the past five years, and most have gone on to higher education.
Nationally, performance on the exams has declined every year for six years, with only six out of 10 passing last year. Public schools, many of them hampered by poorly trained, unaccountable teachers, are failing too many poor black children, experts say.
The Leap schools are the brainchild of John Gilmour, a coach and educator who left a comfortable position as headmaster of a mostly white preparatory high school to start them. Gilmour said he had once believed that sports would be the answer. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he coached a cricket team from the township of Langa that produced stars who played for national teams.
“Then I started going to funerals,” he said.
Players were felled by AIDS, alcohol, crime and violence.
In the 1990s, as principal of a white public high school in the suburb of Pinelands, he started an intensive tutoring program for children from the neighboring Langa township. However, after more than a decade, the students’ scores in math and science had barely budged. In 2003, the year before he started the first Leap school in Pinelands to serve Langa, only six of 650 students in the township who took the matriculation exams scored well enough for university admission.
By then, Gilmour had concluded that children from Cape Town’s vast townships needed far more than a sports team or a few extra hours of tutoring. Leap was the result. The schools — two in Cape Town and one in Johannesburg — are utilitarian structures with worn floors, dedicated staff members who work long hours for modest pay and soaring student choirs. Most of the annual cost of US$4,000 per student is raised privately. The government contributes about US$800 of it.
The schools are still works in progress, conducted in a spirit of experimentation. For the past three summers, Leap has collaborated with a San Francisco-based nonprofit group, Teach With Africa, which this year sent 22 US teachers with their own creative methods to volunteer.
One recent morning, a Leap bus rumbled through the still dark streets of the Crossroads, Gugulethu and Nyanga townships. Clumps of groggy students in charcoal gray skirts and slacks and white shirts trooped on board.
Gcobani’s first class of the day was his favorite. This is his third year taking science from Ross Hill, 31, the son an Anglican pastor and a high school biology teacher who knows the privileges he had growing up white in South Africa and feels a responsibility to help tilt the scales back.
When Gcobani first stepped into class as a 10th-grader, Hill said he knew of the boy’s reputation and braced for a fight, but there was none.
“He loves science,” Hill said.
On this particular morning, the class began with a dull, theoretical review of the photoelectric effect. The students seemed virtually comatose. Then the interplay between Hill and Jamie Brandt, a physics teacher from Marin County, California, woke everyone up.
Brandt, 36, a Teach With Africa volunteer, pantomimed the photoelectric effect in action, pretending to walk through a laser beam and getting the students to describe what happened when his body broke the current.
Hill then instructed the class to act out the photoelectric effect. The photon students bounced into a piece of zinc (a swaying clump of teenagers), causing the electrons (more students) to pop out.
“Come on, photons!” Hill exclaimed. “Just a gentle bump! A loving bump!”
A photon girl nudged the zinc students.
The class howled with laughter, and Hill said: “Oh, sweet.”
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