Marketization of education in South Africa accelerated at the crossroads of the postapartheid democratic transition and global neoliberal turn, reflecting both educational policy impacts of the country's protracted negotiated settlement and transnational trends. A controversial 2018 provincial amendment further entrenched marketization in the…

A provision of India's Right to Education Act requires private schools to enrol 25% of children from 'disadvantaged' and 'economically weaker' backgrounds. Described as a unique public-private partnership, this policy has been widely debated for its promotion of private actors in ensuring equity and access to education. Within this controversial…

This article analyses the status of early childhood education in Pakistan. The education systems in place in Pakistan are mainly framed within a didactic approach to teaching and learning, which addresses certain areas of education but does not teach the child as a whole. Domains of children's holistic development such as social, ethical,…

Despite Public-Private Partnerships' (PPPs) growing popularity within education policy circles, research on their effects yields contradictory results. The understanding of PPP effects is limited by the prevalence of generalist analyses that neglect to acknowledge the exceptional heterogeneity of the policy frameworks in which PPPs crystallize.…

Transnational multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) are proliferating in the domain of education and development. This paper intervenes in scholarly discussions on such partnerships by pondering what post-foundational political thought might add. It is argued that both liberal and critical literature, albeit from very different viewpoints, tend to…

Purpose: This paper is a historical review of the development of private primary and secondary education in Hong Kong from 1841-2012. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolving relationship between the state and private schools in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach: This paper utilizes sources from published official documents,…

Over the last two decades, education privatization has become a widespread phenomenon, affecting most education systems and giving place to a consistent increase in private school enrolment globally. However, far from being a monolithic phenomenon, privatization advances through a variety of context-sensitive policy processes that translate into…

Pakistani children and education face continuous challenges as a result of human callousness and natural forces. These ordeals are more extreme than in many other parts of the world; however, the disadvantages do not end there. An additional, less explored, issue is the effect of class distinction in the Pakistan school system. The majority of…

Scholars have attempted to discern the effects of competition between the public and private education sectors within the United States and in other countries, but no study has attempted to measure systematically the causal impact of competition by looking at variation across countries. Countries where more people choose to invest in private…

This article contributes to research concerning the determinants of student mobility between public and private schools. The authors analyze a unique set of data collected as part of a new evaluation of Milwaukee's citywide voucher program. The authors find several important patterns. Students who switch from the private to the public sector were…

We apply propensity score matching to the estimation of differential school effectiveness between the publicly funded private sector and the public sector in a sample of 26 countries. This technique allows us to distinguish between school choice and school effectiveness processes and thus to account for selectivity issues involved in the…

Educational discourse in Australia has been dramatically altered in recent decades as neoliberal choice policies favouring an increasingly marketized, tiered educational landscape have witnessed a burgeoning of private sector schooling. In this climate, many perceive private sector schooling as providing moral, social and academic benefits beyond…

This article discusses how representations of individual discipline and risk-taking in mass media inform the broader public discourses about public education and the public sector generally. Such representations and narratives about individual discipline and risk-taking often function in mass media as moral imperatives of consumer culture. Such…

In this study, the authors make use of an unusual property of a data set from Bogota--whereby some teachers teach math to more than one group of students--to determine the roles of teacher quality, peer group composition, and class size. They show that all three have effects on student achievement. They also show that the average attributes of…

The past two decades have generated numerous and varied experiments with the use of public resources to support "private" schools, which, in any case, become and behave more like public schools in proportion to their dependence on the public purse. From an equity point of view, however, no compelling moral necessity exists to use public funds to…