There are competing popular beliefs about whether education reform is a fundamentally bipartisan or conservative movement. Yet, despite the popularity of these prevariling depictions, there has been minimal effort expended toward systematically observing the political beliefs of the key players in the education reform movement. I gauge the…

In response to growing pushback to decades of privatization and disinvestment in high-poverty communities of color, elected officials and business leaders in the United States have turned to 'community-engaged strategies' to advance education reform. This qualitative case study of a California school district, the Oakland Unified School District,…

This study provides a historical analysis of the Chicago Public Schools major reform policies and initiatives and their implications for educational leaders and principals in urban areas during the mayoral term of Rahm Emanuel. This analysis includes detailed reform initiatives implemented under several mayors and CEOs leading up to Mayor Rahm…

In 2020, Rick Hess and Pedro Noguera engaged in a long-running correspondence that tackled many of the biggest questions in education -- including topics like school choice, equity and diversity, testing, privatization, the achievement gap, social and emotional learning, and civics. They sought to unpack their disagreements, better understand one…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…

This paper addresses aspects of alternative proposals taking place in the public education system, based on an anthropological, ethnographic, comparative study of alternative schools and educational projects in Catalonia. More specifically, it first explores educational change in Catalonia through time and on the present, with a special focus on…

This article examines the nature of neoliberal influences upon educational policy making in the Finnish education system in recent times. The article draws upon key policy documents, government reports, journal articles and media articles about reforms in the early childhood, basic/compulsory school and vocational education and training sectors to…

To make the case for academia's engagement in knowledge mobilization and public scholarship in social media, we begin by providing a justification for the use of new technological modes for integrating scholarly endeavors. As an example, Sun Tzu's Art of War philosophy is applied to academic scholarship within the present school reform discourse…

This is the second of three articles on "Sources of Authority in Education". All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of Education Reform in the United States as part of what Pasi Sahlberg terms the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This movement is based…

Over the last decades privatization policies have taken centre stage in many processes of educational reform globally. In Latin America, these policies have played an important role since the 1990s leading to an increasing participation of private agents in educational provision. The case of Uruguay stands out for having remained somehow apart…

This research explores the school funding system in post-Soviet Georgia. The research aimed to answer the following research questions: (1) Does the voucher system promote cost effectiveness, and does increased funding improve the academic achievements of schools?; (2) To what extent does the school voucher funding system promote freedom of school…

We examine the role of ideas in the politics of school choice policy and situate our study within scholarship that understands frames and logics as types of ideas operating in the foreground and background of policy debates. Our data are from a case study of political contention over portfolio management reform (in which a central office oversees…

This article explores the Opt Out Florida (OOF) movement, a predominantly woman-led group seeking to dismantle neoliberal education policy by coaching children to boycott high-stakes standardized tests. Guided by Campbell's assertion that neoliberalism will never disappear without a "gender revolution" and Noddings's belief that those…

This paper aims to discuss recent changes in Portugal's education policy. Portugal offers an interesting scenario to study the different ways the economic crisis has brought new opportunities to strengthen the privatization agenda. We specifically focus on media coverage and the contractualization of education services with private schools through…

Education market advocates frequently argue that socioeconomically disadvantaged students could be the main beneficiaries of privatization and market policies. However, the international evidence has shown how privatization and pro-market policies have a negative impact in terms of equity, which particularly affect socioeconomically disadvantaged…