This paper addresses the rise and consequences of an emerging global education industry (GEI), which represents new forms of private, for profit involvement in education across the globe. The paper explores the emergence within the GEI of new and varied, largely transnational, markets in education by focusing on three examples of the GEI at work.…

Research on policy borrowing is a well-established research area of comparative education. Over the past 20 years or so it gained prominence among globalization scholars. Of great interest is not so much the question of which reforms "travel" internationally, and which ones are homebound, but rather why traveling reforms resonate in a…

This article examines a particular type of public-private partnership (PPP) that is rarely studied in comparative educational policy studies: one in which a government funds privately run international schools. The aim of this PPP is to enrich and thereby improve the regular curriculum or to the quality of education in "public schools."…

Because educational research has grown more global in nature over the course of the last few decades, researchers find themselves questioning how best to conceptualize content and establish distinct levels in educational research. Globalization has exacerbated the need to rethink culture and context, to understand how and why similar content are,…

The authors examine indicator research over three periods and discuss shifts in policy usage over time. The study compares influential actors that reflect discursive shifts in how, and for what purpose, indicators were used: (1) Jullien de Paris, (2) faculty at Teachers College at Columbia University in the early-twentieth century (notably Paul…

The article examines two key concepts in research on policy borrowing and lending that are often used to explain why and how educational reforms travel across national boundaries: reception and translation. The studies on reception analyse the political, economic, and cultural reasons that account for the attractiveness of a reform from elsewhere.…

The article examines how and why the method of "comparison against standards" has benefited non-state actors and businesses in the education sector. Drawing on brief examples from international standard schools in Qatar, Indonesia and Mongolia, the author examines how the global education industry uses the reference to…

The article analyses a phenomenon that has accompanied teacher salary reform in Mongolia: the import of two global education policies that were nearly identical to the already existing local bonus system ("olympiads"). To make sense of an import that appears superfluous, the author analyses the reception and translation of the triple…

Sustainability strategies are closely tied to the logic of the donor in every institution. Philanthropies that are set up with a limited time-span tend to scale up their impact differently. The educational programs of the Open Society Institute, for example, prioritize institutionalization over any other sustainability strategy. This is how it…

This article presents an interview with Beatrice Beach Szekely, a comparative education scholar that specialized in the Soviet Union. She was editor of the journal "Soviet Education" from 1970 to 1989. During the interview, Szekely talked about how she became personally involved in Russian/Soviet studies of education. She related that…

This article presents an interview with Harold J. Noah, Gardner Cowles Professor Emeritus of Economics and Education and former dean at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. He edited the "Comparative Education Review" from 1965 to 1971, was president of the U.S. Comparative and International Education Society in 1973, and is…

The authors contend that the impact of the Cold War on multilateral organizations (especially UNESCO) as well as on the academic programs in Comparative and International Education or Development Studies in Education has been largely understudied. Both world-systems (USA and its allies, Soviet Union and its allies) laid claim on the project of…

The 1950s and 1960s were formative years for comparative education societies in different parts of the world, including the United States and Soviet Union. In need of finding a noncapitalist source of inspiration, socialist authors resorted to N. K. Krupskaia (Lenin's wife) as a discursive founder of Marxist-Leninist comparative education. Until…