There is a persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than do small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large, centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more…

In the late 1970s following a military coup, Chile, with its population brutally suppressed, became the first testing ground for the changes that now define neo-liberal recommendations by international funding agencies such as the IMF and World Bank. The changes were dramatic and extensive. The population could not negotiate the terms of change.…