Cooperative Governance of Successful Public Schooling: Successes,Frustrations and Challenges |
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| Authors: | Erika Serfontein |
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| Institution: | North-West University (Vaal Triangle Campus), South Africa, erika.serfontein@nwu.ac.za |
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| Abstract: | In search of embodying values that underpin democracy at school level, the objectives of the article include exploring expectations generated by the constitutional dispensation (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 108/1996, section 41) and delineating those moulded by the South African Schools Act (84/1996, Preamble). While the latter formally signify a State-education-partnership, the intention for teachers, learners and parents to accept especially governance responsibilities towards school democracy prompted our focused three-way alliance between parent-teacher-learner parties for the purpose of this article. Our conceptual framework is informed by Permuth, Mawdsley and Silver (2015), who contend that the essentially new facet of moving towards integrating qualitative research with doing traditional legal research could expand legal reasoning and even complement it with empirical credibility. Authenticated by Adler (2015), the article therefore combines focusing on cooperative governance as an act to shape schooling in the traditional legal way (by asking what questions) with qualitative research features to inform us by also asking how and why questions. We chose a documentary design with a comparative angle; selected documentary resources; and took an exploratory approach to gain understanding and weigh the investigated documents by comparing and appraising primary and secondary sources. We also regarded whatever was embedded yet not recorded as similarly important to what was recorded and how a specific concept was extended (De Waal and Serfontein 2015). Reviewing relevant case law, we present an overview of cooperative school governance progress; a constitutional challenges-based intervention; continuous acceptance of responsibility and accountability; and successes, frustrations and challenges concerning the future pathway to successful schooling. Given the snowballing set of demands on public schools, the catch is for partners to know each other's strengths and weaknesses so that balanced contributions will cause governance towards quality education. The drastic parental governance and leadership role-change, with higher moral-social responsibility levels, calls for carefully designed conferences to guide parent-partners’ exercising the necessary discretion underpinned by critically considering the significance of serving society. |
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| Keywords: | accountability cooperative school governance education/teaching partners participation responsibility school democracy school governance successes frustrations and challenges State-education-partnership successful schooling |
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