Elusive Equity: Education Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa (review)

This text comes at a time when those with a stake in the answers are asking questions about the transformation of education a decade after the end of apartheid. Quite rightly, the title underscores the key point that equity goals are not so easy to attain, especially in the "new" South Africa where significant change is a historical imperative. The authors are a husband-and-wife team based in the United States: Fiske is an educational journalist and Ladd a policy studies specialist. They spent the first six months of 2002 in South Africa, and to judge by the list of references, they consulted with a wide range of political figures, educationists, and local resources on education. Although they acknowledge that they cannot claim the same insights as those who specialize in educational reform and who have had direct experience of the education system in South Africa, their account of the struggle for equity offers the independent viewpoint and objectivity of informed outsiders, and it is evident that they have the skills to do justice to the complex story.

Elusive Equity begins with two background chapters describing the context and analytical framework and providing a brief history of the racial policies and practices of apartheid South Africa. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the role of education in first maintaining and then dismantling apartheid, along with the political aspirations that led to changes. Chapters 5 through 9 constitute the core of the book. They measure recent reform efforts in terms of progress toward equity goals, looking at issues of governance, finance, public and private resource allocations, and curriculum. Chapter 10 offers an analysis of reform in higher education and is followed by a conclusion summarizing the authors' findings.

Equity is a key educational goal in South Africa. The text defines this goal in terms of what the authors call "standards of racial equity": equal treatment, equal educational opportunity, and educational adequacy. The concept of equity may of course be defined in other terms and in other languages. For example, the Sotho equivalent for the word equity is tekatekano, meaning "almost equalized." The notion of fluidity is embedded in tekatekano, recognizing that the state of perfect equality can be wished for but in practice will always be a hit-or-miss proposition—hence the meaning of "almost" equal (M. G. Mahlomaholo, personal communication, 2005). The Afrikaans word gelykheid, on the other hand, denotes equivalence in size, form, or level. The interpretations of the concept of equity offered by Fiske and Ladd do not reflect these nuances, and yet notions such as "fluidity" (for example, in equity processes) and "sameness" (for example in resource allocation) are indicative of the systemic complexity of equity as a policy goal.

As the authors acknowledge, the text is not intended for academics. This does not mean that it will not be useful for policy research, especially because it offers well-substantiated historical perspectives and a meaningful analysis of the context of equity issues in education. Perhaps Fiske and Ladd's most important contribution is their discussion of issues of equal treatment, equal educational opportunity, and educational adequacy with reference to governance, finance, resources, and the school curriculum. These chapters not only draw on various databases, they also offer a meaningful integration of trends and patterns, such as how fiscal limitations affect goals of equity in the implementation of the new school curriculum. The work could usefully be read in conjunction with such classic texts as those by Fischer (Reframing Public Policy [Oxford University Press, 2003]), Sabatier (Theories of the Policy Process [Westview Press, 1999]), Bardach (The Eight-Step Path of Policy Analysis [Berkeley Academic Press, 1996]), and others on policy theory, processes, and evaluation.

A weakness of the book, however, is the frequent reliance on single units of analysis and indicator-based evaluation, a typical failing of policy analyses of this kind. For the sake of measurement and numbers, one...