School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is "public" about schooling. In this…

With its shift to a market economy gathering speed from the 1990s, the Chinese Government embarked on an agenda that brought neoliberal forces into almost all sectors including education. The policies underpinned China's spectacular economic growth, but in education have had consequences that arguably are problematic. Drawing on a mixed-methods…

This article presents the author's response to Strathdee's "Reply to O'Neill: The privatisation of public schooling in New Zealand." Strathdee has alerted the editors to a basic arithmetic error in the author's paper (O'Neill 2011, 24). He also makes substantive criticisms. Strathdee's criticisms focus on the two cases that are used to…

Free school policy claims to partly decentralise to local proposers decisions over who provides a free school, where and for what reasons, within the constraints of a government approval process. This article analyses empirically the people and organisations doing the proposing and their interactions with the approval process. The article begins…

This article uses a social justice framework to problematize national and local policies in housing and education which propose to reduce poverty and improve educational performance of low-income students through mixed-income strategies. Drawing on research on Chicago, the article argues mixed-income strategies are part of the neoliberal…

New Labour promised to introduce dramatic reforms to the education system when it came to power in 1997 and one of the key strategies it employed in the pursuit of educational improvement was the utilisation of the methods of the private sector. Arguably its most controversial policy was its effective privatisation of the functions of "failing"…

Research has examined how college loans affect students, while ignoring implications for families. Recent changes in funding British higher education are consistent with some forms of family assets and obligations, but challenge others. Promotion of privatization and individual investment overlooks the importance of collective private…