Brahm Fleisch is a thought leader, researcher, and advisor on system-wide reform on foundational literacy and numeracy in low- and middle-income countries. He is Professor of Education Policy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a consultant to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and UNICEF.
After earning his PhD at Columbia University in New York, he returned to South Africa in 1990 and joined the University of the Witwatersrand as a lecturer. In 1995, he was appointed one of the first District Directors in the newly formed Gauteng Provincial Department of Education. From 2011 to 2014, he played a leading role in planning and advising on the Gauteng Primary Language and Mathematics Strategy, a pioneering initiative to improve early learning outcomes at scale. Since then, Professor Fleisch has led and supported rigorous impact evaluations of early-grade reading interventions across South Africa and the region.
He has published more than 30 academic articles and several influential books, including Managing Educational Change: The State and School Reform in South Africa; Primary Education in Crisis: Why South African Schoolchildren Underachieve in Reading and Mathematics; (with Stu Woolman) The Constitution in the Classroom: Law and Education in South Africa, 1994–2008; and The Education Triple Cocktail: System-wide Instructional Reform in South Africa.