Massive differentials on achievement tests and examinations reflect South Africa’s
divided past. Improving the distribution of educational outcomes is imperative to overcome
labour market inequalities. Historically white and Indian schools still outperform black and
coloured schools in examinations, and intraclass correlation coefficients (rho) reflect far
greater between-school variance compared to overall variance than for other countries.
SACMEQ’s rich data sets provide new possibilities for investigating relationships
between educational outcomes, socio-economic status (SES), pupil and teacher
characteristics, school resources and school processes. As a different data generating process
applied in affluent historically white schools (test scores showed bimodal distributions), part
of the analysis excluded such schools, sharply reducing rho. Test scores were regressed on
various SES measures and school inputs for the full and reduced sample, using survey
regression and hierarchical (multilevel) (HLM) models to deal with sample design and nested
data. This shows that the school system was not yet systematically able to overcome inherited
socio-economic disadvantage, and poor schools least so. Schools diverged in their ability to
convert inputs into outcomes, with large standard deviations for random effects in the HLM
models. The models explained three quarters of the large between-school variance but little of
the smaller within-school variance. Outside of the richest schools, SES had only a mild
impact on test scores, which were quite low in SACMEQ context.