Reading these words from Thomas Piketty’s 2015 book, “The Economics of Inequality,” led to the musings that follow it in this write-up: “Thus, negative results such as Coleman’s, rather than bolstering the opposition to state intervention to redistribute financial resources to disadvantaged neighborhoods, suggest a need for more radical redistributive methods, such as redrawing school zones to require parents from different groups to send their children to the same schools (given the impossibility of requiring them to live in the same neighborhoods). …In theory, it is therefore possible that everyone would benefit from social integration, but such a social equilibrium cannot be achieved without collective coercion.” The Free Secondary High School (FSHS) policy, introduced by the Akufo-Addo government in the early years of his presidency, made a political sonic boom. The promise of the scheme, with no complete details of how it would be funded and executed, was the source of major political advantage in a political culture that does not always ask for details.
FSHS had the potential to significantly transform Ghanaian society for the better, had the thinking about execution been more long-term oriented, and more holistic in engagement. The key word here is “had.” With no reasonable doubt, the policy has had the impact of increasing quantitative access to education; on the face of it, a good outcome. What is less seriously discussed, though it should, is the qualitative distortions introduced by this policy.
Though budgetary allocation jumped significantly – and one is deliberately not cluttering this think-piece with figures – the evidence of commensurate improvements in quality of outcomes is thin, precariously so. Perhaps for fear of political victimisation, the debate about the deterioration of quality is rather muted – even among the principal actors in the implementation ecosystem. It is not too difficult to work out why this can be the case in a Santa Claus democracy.
Every comment, each remark, any granular reviews, no matter how well-intended, is viewed with partisan suspicion by political actors fixated on the incessant and obsessive electoral calculus of winning votes. So, government employees – which in the end is what public sector educators are – face many of their woes in silence. But even official silence cannot hide forever the impacts of sev…
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