Privatization of public education in North America has long been influenced by two schools of conservative thought: neoliberalism, which seeks to create a marketplace for public services in which individuals choose the option they judge to be in their best interests and government's role is limited as much as possible to simply funding these…

Across Canada, school districts have been confronting a backlash to their equity and social justice initiatives. Critics of public education have been arguing that the solution to these controversies is to increase school choice. Using several examples from the United States, this paper argues that the endgame of these strategies is to undermine…

Across OECD countries, education choice is proliferating as parents seek and governments permit choice both inside and outside public education systems. The movement of students out of the common public school, however, varies significantly across jurisdictions and sociodemographic characteristics such as race and class. This variation in…

Bringing international students to study at U.S. campuses is increasingly viewed as the best option to globalize the campus, yet the United States lags behind other countries in providing opportunities for international students, particularly at the undergraduate level. Although the one million international students studying in the United States…

In this paper, we revisit Brown's ("Br J Soc Educ" 14: 65-85, 1990) concept of "parentocracy" which has been informatively applied in educational research in a number of studies in various countries internationally--but almost none in North America. We provide an expanded conceptualization of parentocracy and suggest that it…

The performance measures included in the 2014/15-2016/17 Service Plan have been reviewed, resulting in the replacement of some measures and the introduction of new measures to more accurately reflect the Ministry's mandate and strategic directions. These changes are discussed in relation to each relevant performance measure. In keeping with the…

This paper provides a descriptive account of the growing landscape of school choice in Canada through a comparative analysis of funding and student enrolment in the public, independent and home-based education sectors in each province. Given that the provinces have responsibility for K-12 education, the mixture of public, independent and home…

The Service Plan outlines the work the Ministry of Education will continue to undertake to modernize education in British Columbia (B.C.) and achieve its vision. The Ministry's work on that transformation focuses on two broad priority areas: (1) Transforming how they support and enable better learning outcomes for B.C. children; and (2)…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…

Freedom of any kind has intrinsic value, and education freedom is controversial, in need of empirical assessment of possible and likely trade-offs between freedom from state control and social goals such as equity and cohesion. Without a reasonable empirical measure of education freedom we can only cite the controversies and choose sides. The…

This article gives an update on school choice in Canada. Currently, school choice in Canada is stable. Provincialism, in both senses of the word, is a major factor in Canadian political life. There is no contradiction between Ontario's recent electoral rejection of the extension of funding to non-Catholic religious schools, and the strong support…

In this article, the author suggests that a Foucaultian analytics of power may be used to explain not only how white, middle-class parents make school choices, but also the effects such choices have on these parents. This essay looks at an empirical moment in which a group of white, middle-class parents responded to a change that occurred in their…

Ontario has an opportunity to implement meaningful and transformational changes that exploit the potential for growth in the new economy and drive it's prosperity to unprecedented levels. But the threats to Ontario's future are just as great. Failing to move forward now with significant measures could leave Ontario unprepared for the challenges…

"Which school should I choose for my child?" For many parents, this question is one of the most important of their lives. "School choice" is a slogan being voiced around the globe, conjuring images of a marketplace with an abundance of educational options. Those promoting educational choice also promise equality, social…

The intergenerational earnings regression in Canada suggest that credit limits educational choice. Nonlinearities in earnings regressions cannot be used as evidence of binding credit constraints, and concave regressions do not follow from credit constraints.