More on Tanzanian Education

Some partial news stories from the paper this week--

*The government revealed that the country is in danger of losing more than 27,000 teachers by 2020 from AIDs. That amounts to approximately 3,600 teachers per year. The country has the capacity to train approximately 1,200 teachers per year, which even currently does not meet the need.

*Suppliers of food to public secondary schools, including boarding schools, in Tabora have stopped their services because they say the government owes them Tsh300 million (approximately $250,000).

*The Dr. Omary Ally Juma Primary School in Dar es Salaam has 2,320 students--and no bathrooms. They are forced to share the 9 latrines with the school next door--the Karume Primary School, which has 2,600 students. That's almost 5,000 students for 9 pit toilets. Amazingly, these two schools used to be one large monstrosity, but they were divided after the Primary Education Development Plan in 2001. The act called for splitting overcroweded schools to create more space for new students.

Parents of students at these schools are unwilling/unable to pay for digging more latrines. Many of the children come from homes where several families share one latrine, or have none available.

Apparently the PEDP, which mandates education for all children ages 7-13, placed emphasis on building classrooms, but not anything else (like sanitation facilities). This act, along with the Secondary Education Development Plan, calls for more schools and more teachers, but with virtually no funding to accomplish either.

The teaching profession here can be bleak. Once a teacher graduates, they are assigned to a government school somewhere in the country and have little say in where they go. Once they've begun their teacher track, if they leave the profession at any time during their lives they lose all their pension. So you have a situation where a person is bound financially to be a teacher for 30+ years, even if they found out after year 4 that they really weren't suited for the job. Teachers who are able to land jobs in private schools don't have the same restrictions, but those jobs are even harder to find.

So if you are pondering the status of American education (Lord knows there's room for improvement there, too)--you can be grateful for all the things we can afford to take for granted.