Teacher's salaries make up a significant portion of government spending on education in most of sub-Saharan Africa. We examine the relationship between increased spending on additional teachers and education quality, as measured, respectively, by lower pupil-teacher ratios and educational attainment using South Africa as a case study. In the apartheid era, most Black South Africans were disadvantaged and their schools were poorly resourced. To deal with this issue, post-apartheid governments have, among other things, increased their spending on basic education, mainly through increases in government-employed teachers to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio. Using a reduced form production function approach, we apply a partial proportional odds model to identify heterogeneous effects of the pupil-teacher ratio at different levels of education.