I am happy to announce the release of a new book, The Politics and Governance of Basic Education: A Tale of two South African Provinces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2018), co-authored/edited with colleagues from the University of Cape Town – and (by agreement with OUP)  available via this link for free download.  The book uses the approach to governance I laid out in Working with the Grain  (Oxford 2014) to better understand: (i) why  gains in access to schooling have not translated into gains in learning.  (ii) how context shapes the performance of public education bureaucracies; and (iii)  the potential and limits of participatory governance, both as a complement to bureaucracy, and as a substitute when bureaucracy is weak.  Click here for my summary take of the main findings and implications of the research.