Learning Conversations Stillborn: Distrust and Education Policy Dialogue in South Africa

Brahm Fleish describes how the potential for conversations to be sites of learning can be undermined by those with conflicting agendas in a policy context in South Africa. This chapter exemplifies how trust and respect need to underpin the relationships of those involved in evidence-informed conversations if they are to solve rather than exacerbate complex educational problems. Instead of engaging in the difficult task of developing nuanced interpretations from multiple data sources, a single data source showing disappointing student achievement results was used as a platform for assigning blame according to predetermined politically driven notions of causation. In the absence of trust, the potential for these differing causal theories to develop rich diagnoses and solutions was not realized.