The achievement of equity is a central component of attempts to restructure education in postapartheid South Africa. But recent efforts to do so have faced significant challenges. This article traces the impact, consequences, and contradictions of recent initiatives to achieve equity through teacher redeployment and rationalization policies and provides two main explanations for their contradictory short-term outcomes: one related to the technical-rational approach underlying the implementation process and the other to the neoliberal policy frames that structure the policies. We argue that these specific policies are aspects of wider cost-reduction strategies linked to voluntarily imposed structural adjustment policies. We examine the obstacles to implementation decentralized decision-making processes and financial crises in the provinces and then explore responses by teacher unions and teachers in schools. It shows that redeployment was not a popular policy, was more expensive than anticipated, and evoked widespread opposition as the cost-reduction imperatives became evident.
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