Highlights
Introduction
This paper presents a comparative review of school dropout rates in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). Given that education is a key to social cohesion, social and economic development; the rate with which learners drop out of school has been described as alarming (Alexandra, 2008; UNESC, 2013).
Accordingly, effective policies for reducing the rate of school dropout requires a knowledge of the causative factors across nations that share some economic and social interests as a common agenda for development. Such interests currently exists amongst the BRICS countries, and this makes it imperative to review some common factors catalyzing school dropout in these countries since such common factors may lead to synergies in educational policies across these countries. Thus the major aim of this paper is to explore the causes of school dropout in the BRICS countries, and to offer suggestions towards alleviating the rate of school dropouts.
Whilst the literature has explored several factors leading to school dropout rates in different BRICS countries, this paper offers a brief syntheses of these researches, and in addition, looks specifically at the relationship between school dropout rate, government expenditure and poverty in South Africa. This examination of relationship appears unique from other dropout related literatures in South Africa as it offers a nuanced dimension for analysing school dropout from the perspective that the poor needs adequate support from government educational budget, and as well, from the private sector, especially as poverty and inequality is still rife in South Africa (Finn et al, 2014), and education is a catalyst for desired skills production (Mavuso, 2014); such potential skills productivity does not only reside amongst the rich class, but budding skills also abound amongst the poor communities who need educational assistance to develop such skills. The paper thus adds a modest policy implication around education for the poor and reduction of inequality.
This paper is structured as follows: the section following the introduction presents a brief review of related literature, this is followed by an analysis of possible relationship between school dropout rate, government expenditure and poverty in South Africa. The last section presents the conclusion and recommendation.
Related Literature
In their research on the impact of poverty on school dropout in China, Brown & Park (2002) divided family unit and school study information from poor areas in six Chinese territories to look at the impacts of poverty, intra-family choice making, and school quality on learners’ performance; in conclusion, Brown & Park (2002) found that poverty fundamentally influences both the ability of parents to learners from families that are poor are three times as prone to drop out of school more than others.
Furthermore, they find that girls with poor performance at primary school are more prone to dropout than their boys’ counterparts; women’s empowerment towards enrolment choices reduces the likelihood of school dropout; siblings enrolled in the same school have lower propensity to drop out of school; and that the quality of schools affects the completion time of learners. These findings were corroborated by Connelly& Zheng (2003) who evaluated the “determinants of school enrolment and completion in China” Connelly& Zheng (2003, p. 379) and found amongst others that that rural learners have a lower rate of enrolment and graduation; and that parents’ education, enrolment of siblings in the same school and income level influences the school enrolment and completion time of learners.
Another study by (Li et al, 2013) discover that peer influence is a factor that may also lure learners to drop out of school; thus according to (Li et al, 2013) there is a correlation between peers’ dropout and learners dropout of school and that such effect is more pronounced in older students. Whilst looking at dropout from grandparenting perspective, Zeng & Xie (2014) found that grandparents’ “sociopsychological” (p.599) standing has a direct influence on grandchildren’s educational enrolment and completion outcome in china. This finding has an important lesson for many South African young women who are in the habit of keeping their school age children under the care of their grandparents.
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