The author founded Greater Newark Charter School in 2000 at a time when charter schools were little more than a nuisance to the traditional public school establishment. Just two years earlier, when first learning about charter schools, he recalls questioning the necessity for "new" schools when so many operational public schools were in…

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, many community colleges have experienced significant declines in state revenue, increases in enrollment, higher tuition, and flat or declining state student aid. These conditions have also occurred in an environment of heightened accountability with pressure to advance a student success agenda and to…

This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each…

To what extent school improvement processes can be initiated and sustained from the outside has been a relevant question for policy-makers seeking to increase quality in education. Since 2008, the Chilean Government is strongly promoting the use of external technical support (ETS) services to support school improvement processes, as part of the…

Within a quarter century after the end of World War II (1945-1970), largely because of the support and investment it received from the State, the University of California had changed from two modest-size general campuses (Berkeley and Los Angeles) and the medical campus in San Francisco (UCSF), to a system of eight general campuses. California was…

For years, critics have pointed to the decreasing ability of health-care professionals to make decisions and provide services because of the demands of insurance companies and health-management organizations to sustain profits. Health-care decisions are increasingly being made by the wrong people and for the wrong reasons. So, too, with public…

This article attempts to address theoretical questions regarding the transition towards an entrepreneurial university and the changes associated with this process, namely the increased commodification, the competitive quest for private funding and the introduction of business management practices. The important theoretical advances made in the…

If managerialism points to the ideological foundations and bureaucratisation of contemporary education, marketisation signals its commodification, image and exchange. This paper brings to bear the prevailing influence of marketisation on education. It begins with a brief description of the European context and development of learning outcomes, and…

Private prisons are here to stay irrespective of empirical findings for or against their existence in the corrections industry. It is necessary, therefore, to step back and consider them on a broader level to assess how they can benefit current penological practice. It will be argued that prison privatization creates an opportunity to reassess the…

More than 150 years ago Horace Mann persuasively reasoned that education is the "balance wheel" of the social structure. He argued that education should be free and universal. While much progress has been made in establishing a universal education system since Mann spoke those words, substantial disparities in educational resources,…

Efforts to privatize education, eliminate teachers' unions, reduce spending on public education, and quantify student performance have demoralized teachers in the USA, and educators struggle to keep up with the many changes while still effectively teaching and caring for their students. Within these reforms, however, there is support for history…

Philanthropic interest in K-12 education has grown substantially in the past 10 years, with some estimates putting K-12 educational spending at 25% of all philanthropic giving. Critics have pointed to the lack of educational expertise held by philanthropists and the intrusive nature of their giving, calling them a small group of billionaires…

This article argues that how we think about education must extend far beyond matters of schooling and include those spaces, practices, discourses and maps of meaning and affect produced through a range of cultural and pedagogical technologies. We live at a time in which the educational influence of the larger culture has become the major force in…

The National Quality Improvement Center on the Privatization of Child Welfare Services selected Illinois as a demonstration site in 2007 to evaluate performance-based contracting in residential treatment services. This article discusses the first two years of project implementation including developing residential treatment performance indicators,…

The private tutoring industry has come forward as the third great sector of education. The common sense representation about private tutoring is changing. The growing search for supplementary educational support services and the technological innovation have created a new paradigm. This paper focuses on one of the most interesting faces of this…