The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organization has generated an intense and passionate debate about the relationship between free-trade and education and, specifically, about the effects of trade liberalization in national education systems. This article explores in detail this debate from a critical discourse…

Many students take water availability for granted and yet, by 2025, two-thirds of the world will not have access to clean drinking water. This case study is designed to encourage students to think about water as a limited natural resource and is used to highlight how the exploitation of water can have far-reaching social, political, and economic…

This article examines the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism and education policy in Chicago. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race, the author argues that education is constitutive of material and ideological processes of neoliberal restructuring, its…

During the last couple of years the Norwegian media have on several occasions highlighted failings in the Child Welfare Services, and in particular the failure of finding good foster carers for children and young people who need it. An additional discussion has been the use of private actors in the care market, a discussion that to some extent…

Responding to the recent work of Andrew Gamble, the article discusses the extent to which the British situation can be described in terms of crisis. It suggests that an essential element of crisis is that of political and social contestation, and explores the terms on which contestation is taking shape in and around British education.

Over the last almost two decades, high-stakes testing has become increasingly central to New York's schools. In the 1990s, the State Department of Education began requiring that secondary students pass five standardized exams to graduate. In 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act required students in grades three through eight to take math and…

An institutional analysis is presented of the policy, political, and legislative events associated with the failure of an attempt in 2006 by the state of Maryland to take control of 11 schools in Baltimore City and turn them over to independent managers or into charter schools under No Child Left Behind. The place of the failed…

Incorporating data from two years of ethnographic teacher-research, this article explores how a curriculum of "professionalism" resonates with teachers and students in a small New York City school of choice. Using the literature on Critical Whiteness Studies and philanthrocapitalism in the context of New York City Mayor Michael…

Today the requirements in higher education are vast and majority of the population in the country cannot afford higher education as their per capita income is very low. Neither the government nor the private sector alone can cater to the requirements of higher education. It is in this context, one should look at the scope, feasibility,…

Bright Horizons, a private school located in Florida, specializes in working with students of varying exceptionalities and is founded on the principles of action research. It began as an effort to create an alternative educational opportunity for a few specific children and grew into a special education school open to the community. The purpose of…

Studying community engagement provides another lens for examining how neoliberal universities collaborate with external organizations to move closer to the market, often in the hope of promoting the public good. This study examined the tension between the public and private aspects of university-community partnerships by studying the impact of…

In the context of the privatization of higher education, this study examines the possible role of state finances in promoting equal educational opportunities. Through the combined use of a national representative database and a state finance database and the application of hierarchical generalized linear modeling methods, this study found that…

Privatization has been used to address the limited capacity of government to achieve positive results in child welfare systems. Privatized systems have not realized better outcomes than their public counterparts, however, and many states continue to struggle with implementation. In order to demonstrate that privatization is in fact an investment…

Previous empirical literature finds that government expenditure on higher education has a negative, or null, effect on U.S. economic growth rates. This empirical result may be driven by omission of an important variable--the privatization of higher education. Using state-level panel data from 1970 to 2005, this analysis investigates whether the…

In this essay, the author discusses schooling in the context of war, privatization, and the general neo-liberal shift in education. Specifically, the author reflects on the experiences of three schools in Medellin, Colombia, that are found in the cross-hairs of an ongoing civil conflict. In contrast to the prevailing ideologies and social…