School-choice policies are expected to generate healthy competition between schools, leading to improvements in school quality and better outcomes for students. However, the empirical literature testing this assumption yields mixed findings. This systematic review and meta-analysis tests this theory by synthesizing the empirical literature on the…

The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial…

Individualism and competition are central neoliberal concepts that have profoundly altered the U.S. public education system. This article draws on poststructuralist theory and advances the argument that these concepts have produced problematic policies and deeply flawed school choice mechanisms such as charter schools and school vouchers. I also…

Despite controversies surrounding faith-based schooling, religious schools continue to play a prominent role in numerous education systems. Nonetheless, empirical research on nonstate religious schools operating in a market context remains limited and fragmented. On the one hand, while religious and cultural studies investigate the evolution of…

There are two competing understandings on how school organizations behave when faced with competition. One is they respond to competitive pressure with innovation. The other is they pursue strategies of isomorphism, copying practices and avoiding innovation. This study examines competitive response patterns related to cyber charter schools in…

This article presents the findings of research focused on schools' responses to competitive environments. Using the Chilean education market as a case study, the article analyzes not only the responses developed by schools in different domains in the face of competitive incentives but also their diversity, as well as motivations, rationalities,…

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school…

The availability of public funding for private schools, in both primary and secondary education, has become a common feature in a number of OECD countries. The expansion of public subsidies for privately owned schools has consequences that go far beyond the involvement of private actors in the provision of education. These include deepening forms…

This interview study explored the experience of principals as they mediate reforms marked by high-stakes accountability and competition between schools at the intersection of gentrification occurring in their school communities. School principals of high schools within New York City are called to mediate mandated school choice with the continued…

This study analyzes the effect of spatial competition on public schools' efficiency in Chile, an extreme case of market-oriented reforms in the educational sector. To address this issue, we use a measure of competition that captures three major characteristics of market competition in a spatial context: the number of competitors, based on distance…

When the District of Columbia's city councilors handed Mayor Adrian Fenty control of the city's public schools in 2007, they were hoping for salvation. Or maybe just absolution. Fenty appointed Michelle Rhee, then-president of The New Teacher Project, as chancellor. She and her longtime colleague and eventual successor Kaya Henderson spent the…

This article investigates why school choice is exercised to a limited degree by parents despite major government initiatives to enhance diversity, competition and choice in the Danish education system. Denmark has had 20 years of centre-right governments, promoting choice reforms perhaps even more vigorously than the other Nordic countries, yet…

The United Kingdom's 2010 Academies Act further widened the school and State relationship with free schools, in particular, becoming a model separately identified as endorsing and celebrating the neoliberal ideology of competition informed by market principles. The main features of the model are described and complemented with illustrative…

Crises have a way of shaking up the status quo and creating space for new thinking. When shocked out of their familiarity, people start to ask questions as to why things are the way that they are and brainstorm ways to make them better. Enter entrepreneurs. They are the people who take those ideas that are lying around and attempt to create…

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…