A school-focused commercializing process over 100 years in the making has been turbo-charged by the rise of data-collecting digital educational platforms and a pandemic that has forced widespread use of distance learning. Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger explain how advertising to students creates what John Dewey would call "mis-educative…

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,…

Marketing in schools has a new twist, and teachers are at the center. Corporate firms, particularly those producing education-technology products, have contracted with teachers to become so-called brand ambassadors and micro-influencers. Scant research, however, has examined these brand ambassador arrangements, leaving policymakers uninformed…

This article explores how a growing apparatus of edupreneurial actors offers solutions for the current 'school crisis' and how these commercial actors become taken for granted in the public school system. The Swedish case is interesting, as it involves a once-strong welfare state that is now associated with both the neoliberal discourse of…

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…

Kappan's editor talks with Queensland University researcher Anna Hogan about the rapid growth of commercial activity in Australia's schools and in school systems around the world. Private businesses have always sold textbooks, classroom tools, and other goods and services to public schools, and many teachers are happy to purchase and use them,…

Using the stories of two autonomous public schools in Australia, this paper demonstrates how commercialisation can simultaneously position schools as both consumer and for-profit producer. Drawing on Foucault's articulation of discourse as that which constitutes and makes available what is possible to be said, done and imagined, the paper…

This article uses edvertising as a vehicle through which to examine autonomy and control for key agents in education when market-like reforms are combined with privately led management of schools. We begin by outlining the philosophical foundations of school choice from the perspective of autonomy and control, and then lay out the case of…

Fundraising and collecting fees are ubiquitous in Ontario, Canada's public schools. Critics assert that these practices perpetuate and exacerbate inequities between schools and communities. In this article we present findings from a critical policy analysis of an advocacy group's efforts to change Ontario's fees and fundraising policies over the…

A post-structural approach to exploring identity is taken in this paper in that identity is considered here as being socially constructed through discourse, which has deep implications for the shaping of subjectivity and practice. Given both the potential academisation and Anglicisation of Irish schools, and the additional re-drawing of what…

Although in plain sight daily, a highly successful war against the public schools has been hidden in the shadows of public consciousness. Only very recently have several people written articles about this war, with the only book calling it a war being written in 2002. Neither the public nor educators have become aware of the far-reaching extent…

In the United States, corporate school reform or neoliberal educational restructuring has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum, and nearly all aspects of educational reform. Although this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced now…

Direct subsidy scheme (DSS) schools are a product of Hong Kong's market-oriented educational reform, mirroring global reform that champions parental choice and school marketization. Such schools have greater autonomy in matters of curricula, staffing, and student admission. Although advocates of the DSS credit it with increasing educational…

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the socioeconomic status (SES) school segregation in Chile, whose educational system is regarded as an extreme case of a market-oriented education. The study estimated the magnitude and evolution of the SES segregation of schools at both national and local levels, and it studied the relationship between…

School choice advocates often assume that market-like competition will create a dynamic K-12 educational environment that will result in improved outcomes. We critically examine this assumption and draw on the literature on market failure and social dilemmas to demonstrate that the market metaphor in a public schooling context has limited utility.…