A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Levy, Brian (Ed.); Cameron, Robert (Ed.); Hoadley, Ursula (Ed.); Naidoo, Vinothan (Ed.) Book — Published Version The Politics and Governance of Basic Education: A Tale of Two South African Provinces Provided in Cooperation with: Oxford University Press (OUP) Suggested Citation: Levy, Brian (Ed.); Cameron, Robert (Ed.); Hoadley, Ursula (Ed.); Naidoo, Vinothan (Ed.) (2018) : The Politics and Governance of Basic Education: A Tale of Two South African Provinces, ISBN 978-0-19-255735-3, Oxford University Press, Oxford, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198824053.001.0001 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/186141 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ www.econstor.eu OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi The Politics and Governance of Basic Education OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi The Politics and Governance of Basic Education A Tale of Two South African Provinces Edited by Brian Levy, Robert Cameron, Ursula Hoadley, and Vinothan Naidoo 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. 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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi Foreword I What is distinctive about both this compelling book and a related (forthcoming) OUP collection1 (also based on research conducted with the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre) is the insistence that the crisis of schooling without learning is fundamentally a challenge of politics and governance, and that the routes forward must involve changes in these interrelated realms. This emphasis on politics and governance resonates with wider debates within international development and policy. Indeed, the analysis and find- ings presented in this book operate at the cutting-edge of a broader discourse on development in the twenty-first century, stretching far beyond the field of education. By bringing high-level debates around the role of inter-elite bar- gaining in shaping long-term development trajectories into direct contact with pressing issues of service delivery, it starts to breach what Merilee Grindle terms the ‘missing middle’ of the newly emerging governance agenda. The book’s presentation of a method that enables us to identify and explore how different kinds of reform unfold in different ways in different types of contexts marks a considerable advance on the now-anodyne insistence that ‘context matters’. The rigorous comparison between two provinces within South Africa illustrates the power of the method, and offers an approach that can be borrowed for many other such studies. Importantly, this approach uses comparisons between the Western Cape and other settings to reveal the limitations of systems that rely too heavily on hierarchical accountability mechanisms and bureaucratic procedures, as opposed to more flexible systems for governing service provision. Brian Levy, the lead editor and principal investigator behind the research on which this book is based, has already contributed much to the project of rethinking the politics of development and devising ‘best-fit’ governance solutions for particular types of context, not least through his 2014 book Working with the Grain. This new work builds directly on this wider project— 1 The Politics of Education in Developing Countries: From Schooling to Learning?, edited by Sam Hickey and Naomi Hossain, will be published by OUP in 2018. The book centres on six country case studies, and includes a chapter on South Africa by Brian Levy and colleagues. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi Foreword I both by bringing it right down to the front line of service delivery, and also by further proving the benefits of ‘thinking and working politically’ for all of those concerned with understanding how injustices such as the learning crisis occur and how they might be challenged. Professor Sam Hickey Professor of Politics and Development at the University of Manchester, and Joint Director of Research at the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi Foreword II Three features of this book make it a valuable contribution to the research literature on the governance of schools and the systems which sustain them. First, it engages in ground-clearing scholarship which describes the myriad changes which have occurred in South Africa since the advent of democratic rule in 1994. These include a radical restructuring of the school system and the way it is financed and governed, no fewer than three waves of curriculum reform, and a complete overhaul of the way in which teachers’ work is regulated. In ‘steady-state’ countries, such developments evolved over the span of a century or so; in South Africa they have been crammed into a tumultuous one-quarter of this time. In tracking the details of these changes, many of the chapters of this volume provide a service which will be of inestimable value to scholars, not only in South Africa but to students of social change everywhere. The second feature of the book which commands attention is the theoret- ical lens developed to examine school governance. Breaking free of the either/ or approach, which pits the power of centralized decision-making against the democratic advantages of local control, the book is premised on a more complex and productive both/and perspective. Two sets of axes define this terrain. Technocratic, impersonal rules of ‘best practice’ are in tension with politics, patronage and negotiation; predatory elites compete with citizens pursuing their rights to a fair share of social goods. The third focus, and the heart of the book, puts the first two elements in conversation. The book is an extended reflection on the forces at play between top-down hierarchical processes and horizontal participation by local actors in the governance and management of schools. One after the other, successive chapters examine the interactions between contextual complexities, policy frameworks and institutional competencies in two very different provincial settings: the Western Cape and its eastern neighbour, the two major compo- nents of the Cape Province prior to 1994. The book’s combination of macro- and micro-perspectives enables novel linkages to emerge that are invisible from either point of view alone. The theoretical framework provides import- ant insights into the unpredictable trade-offs between pragmatic politics and idealistic civil service reform initiatives. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi Foreword II A variety of methodologies—socio-political, econometric, system-level