Political Transformation and Education Sector Performance in South Africa

This chapter explores how political and institutional constraints influenced education policymaking and implementation in South Africa at national, provincial, and school levels. Stark differences between the Eastern and Western Cape provinces offer a natural experiment for exploring how context matters. The Eastern Cape’s socio-economic, political, and institutional legacy resulted in a low-level equilibrium trap—one where multiple political patronage networks were mirrored by a factionalized, fragmented bureaucracy. The Western Cape, by contrast, enjoyed a more supportive environment for the operation of public bureaucracy. However, bureaucracy need not be destiny. The research also found that strong hierarchy can result in formal compliance and a low-level equilibrium of mediocrity. Participatory school-level governance potentially can improve outcomes. Whether this potential is realized depends on the relative strength of developmentally oriented and predatory actors, with the outcomes not foreordained by local context, but contingent and cumulative.

Similarities and Differences in Policy Reform Destinies

This chapter offers an alternative reading that supports most of the conclusion but which draws closer attention to the critical issue of implementation. In many respects the six country cases focused on have followed a similar path in education policy: all expended significant effort increasing coverage in line with an international agenda and often national project; all came to recognize the limits of this for quality outcomes; and all subsequently attempted to implement quality-oriented reforms. They differ, however, in the success of this implementation and the subsequent outcomes of these latter reforms. With quality being far harder to deliver than access, these reforms exposed the fault lines within their political settlements. Political constituencies and actors within the sector resisted them, and technical limitations and influence of policy legacies became evident. Part of the policy agenda that emerges from this is finding ways to counteract these political vulnerabilities, for example, by focusing on sub-national political dynamics, or by linking education quality to a national project of development.

Understanding the Politics of the Learning Crisis

This chapter reflects on the key contribution of this volume to debates around global education, and offers critical comments as to how this analysis can be further developed. Conventional analyses of education systems in developing countries typically identify what can be termed ‘proximate causes’ to poor quality education, often located within the sector itself, and on the basis of this, offer solutions that are either technocratic, or rest hope in electoral democracy. This volume offers a useful corrective to such understandings. Using the concepts of policy domains and political settlements, the framework developed here helps move beyond simplistic discourse of ‘democracy’ to examine the complexities in how government types influence outcomes in education. More work however remains to be done. The cases can only draw on limited data on education quality, we need to be cautious of claims that particular settlement ‘types’ lead to certain outcomes, and further linkages to policy and practice would be beneficial.

Identifying the Political Drivers of Quality Education

This chapter consolidates findings from the country cases to offer insight into the politics of education reform. It argues that the education sector presents different resources and incentives to political elites, and as such, the political settlement has a direct bearing on the potential for, and delivery of, reforms. At a national level, political dominance can enable elites to overcome vested interests, but may prevent the emergence of coalitions for learning reforms. More competitive polities are more vulnerable to short-termism and vested interests. At the local level, an absence of political dominance combined with decentralisation can lead to innovative solutions to educational challenges. The strategic implications of the analysis presented include that learning reforms should be closely aligned to the dynamics of the political settlement, and underscore the importance of coalition building. Analysis should be sensitive to the sub-national political dynamics, and recognize the value of ‘best-fit’ local solutions.

Decentralization and Teacher Accountability

Despite series of reforms designed to improve the basic education system in Ghana, the quality of education remains low. This chapter uses a political settlement analysis to explore why this is the case. Focusing on the issue of teacher accountability and performance, we argue that a key reform—decentralization—remains a highly contested process. The current system generates insufficient incentives for effective forms of policy implementation and accountability to emerge at scale. The evidence suggest that improving educational quality depends on reform-minded coalitions made up of state and non-state actors, and a stable political settlement at the district level. We conclude that where good practice is experienced, it is as a result of efforts by these coalitions to devise and enforce local-level solutions to local problems.

The Political Economy of Education Quality Initiatives in Uganda

Uganda has seen a significant increase in access to primary education since 1996 but without an increase in quality learning. We show that there are weak political incentives to undertake reforms to enhance quality learning, for three reasons: (i) A system of decentralized rent management renders quality improvements arbitrary; (ii) There is a legacy of fee-free education playing an important part in the electoral appeal of the National Resistance Movement for rural voters; (iii) The pressure to push through education quality-enhancing reforms, whether from civil society, powerful interest groups, or parliament, is too weak to overpower incentives to address the learning crisis head-on. At the local level, the school administrations in high-performing schools were able to draw upon resourceful networks in order to mobilize local council funds and parents’ contributions, in spite of the official policy of free education.

The Political Economy of Primary Education Reform in Cambodia

Over the past sixty years, Cambodia has made great strides in expanding access to primary education. Much less progress has been made with respect to quality. That may be changing, however, with a new education minister promoting ambitious reforms with quality at their centre. The chapter explains the quality agenda as a product of new demands on the country’s political settlement, in which continued dominance of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) rests in part on ongoing economic transformation and job creation—for which a better educated workforce is a prerequisite. With a politically enfeebled opposition, the CPP has the benefit of being able to plan for the long term in this regard. At the same time, the personalized nature of its settlement, in which weak state organs are permeated by rent-seeking factions, will make delivering on quality an uphill struggle.

The Problem of Education Quality in Developing Countries

The universalization of basic education was set to be one of the great policy successes of the twentieth century, yet millions are still unenrolled, and many of those who attended school learned little. The ‘learning crisis’ now dominates the global education policy agenda, yet little is understood of why education quality reforms have had so little success compared to earlier expansionary reforms. This chapter sets out the rationale for this book, which is to explore how the nature of the political settlement or distribution of power between contending social groups in a given country shapes efforts to get learning reforms on the policy agenda, how they are implemented, and what difference they make to what children learn. It discusses debates about the sources and determinants of the learning crisis, examining its extent and nature and providing a rationale for the key themes the book takes up in subsequent theoretical, empirical, and comparative chapters.

The Downsides of Dominance

Since the end of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda’s government has charted an audacious development project aimed at social and economic transformation. Formal education has featured prominently in this project. It has introduced policies to improve enrolment at the primary and secondary level. But recent evidence has shown that many students failed to meet basic reading and arithmetic standards. Dropout, repetition, completion, and transition rates have not fared well. Given the ruling party’s commitment to delivering development, why has it not introduced reforms that have improved educational standards? This chapter draws from policy analysis and fieldwork across two districts to explore the interaction between Rwanda’s political settlement and the education policy domain, to shed light on its surprising inability to improve learning. This failure is surprising because the Rwandan political elite has demonstrated both capacity and willingness to undertake and implement reforms it has deemed necessary to deliver development in other sectors.

The Politics of Learning Reforms in Bangladesh

Why has Bangladesh failed to raise quality in basic education after it so successfully expanded school provision? This chapter explores the politics of both Bangladesh’s successful expansionary, and its lagged efforts to tackle the persistently poor quality of basic education. Using a political settlements lens, it shows how the competitive but clientelistic nature of Bangladesh’s politics shaped policies to expand schooling provision, without attending to learning—and in particular without addressing teacher performance. It analyses the elite consensus on mass education and the design of the Third Primary Education Development Programme (2011–15), tracing the analysis down through the education administration system to how schools themselves implement learning reforms. It concludes that the state has started to take learning seriously, but the political impetus for policies to hold teachers accountable for their performance lacks the wide support of the successful expansionary drive, so that any progress is slow.