No quick fixes for education sector woes

Staff at Technical University of Mombasa demonstrate during the strike on September 18, 2024. [Kelvin Karani, Standard]

Services are more brittle than products. Surprised?  If a glass breaks, you replace it with another.

If a car crashes, you just replace it. If a patient is misdiagnosed or mis-educated, you can’t get a replacement. If there is a power outage, you can’t recover the lost time or productivity. Still surprised? 

This truth has pervaded us for too long. Think of how long it takes to treat a disease and the lost productivity.

Think of the loss to the individual and the society when someone goes through a bad education system. They will not come back to school if the quality of education improves.

Those who went through the 8-4-4 education system cannot go back to the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC).  

You will not drink more water because you now have tap water. A lost service is just that. Add the fact that once customers lose faith in a service, it’s very hard to recover; that is where the brittleness comes in. 

Given this observation, why do we end up having students, teachers, lecturers or doctors engage in industrial action? 

The simple answer is money. But it’s more than that. Think of education; in the past, the top-performing schools were under missionaries.

They were dedicated and long-term oriented. I found the last of them in my high school. Some are buried in the schools they headed.

How many headmasters would want to be buried in the schools they head? Would parents allow it?   The missionary zeal is very rare nowadays.

I have repeatedly suggested that a Bachelor of Education degree should only be the first choice to keep the missionary zeal alive. 

Money is important, but it should be tied to productivity. That is why professions that are prone to industrial action are hard to link to productivity.  

Yet the secret to ending industrial action is to use economics. Tie productivity to salaries and other perks.

A teacher who gets a mean of 2.00 and another who gets a mean of nine gets the same pay rise, whether from industrial action or normal increments. The same applies to doctors and dons. 

We could easily reward the best-performing teachers or lecturers by following up with their students every five years in addition to annual appraisals.

That can inform us of the teachers or lecturers who did their work and had an impact. We can use ICT to collect data.

A good example is that any rise in employability (including self) of the students after five years can be rewarded with a certain pay rise for teachers and dons. That should look at external factors too like economic growth rate.  In some countries, dons are paid if they publish in high-quality journals –very measurable. 

We can let patients rate their doctors too, not just on the time it took them to heal but also on things like empathy. 

Once we measure productivity, remuneration is easier. We can learn from the private sector.  The second way to reduce industrial action is to index our salaries to inflation so that the purchasing power is preserved. The prices of goods and services go up, but wages and salaries remain the same. That is why most employees keep a side hustle that helps them keep up with inflation. Those who can’t run side hustles run corruption networks. The third way is to ensure equal work and efforts are rewarded equally. A good example is who earns more, a Member of County Assembly (MCA) with whichever level of education or a PhD holder toiling in lecture halls?

Where do we go from here? We must preempt strikes; they affect real people, and irreversibly. Think of students who take longer to graduate and the loss in money to be earned in future. 

Think of the dent in our global image through industrial action. Are we not seeking jobs abroad? 

More poignant is that the key losers in industrial action just pile more losses. Are students from private schools and universities affected? They graduate faster and have more time to earn and improve their lives.   

Let’s be real. Remember the men and women who never went to school during the apartheid era or Kenya’s emergency? How long will it take for their families to catch up? Why should we disadvantage the disadvantaged more? Students affected by strikes and those not affected meet in the same job market. 

Strikes inadvertently entrench the class system. Those who can afford will shift to “stable “universities, without strikes. The rest can go to the rising number of public universities or Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions.

Yet our universities used to be melting pots of cultures and social classes - a peasant son shared lectures with a minister’s daughter.

Some of us went abroad because we missed the cut-off points to join local universities. Who goes to study abroad today?  In the long run, the economic gaps education is supposed to close are widening. That is how to create an unstable society.

Industrial action is not just about money and singing: “Solidarity forever.” It’s about real people, their families and their future.  Can we reason together?