External and standardized assessments based on student results are a contested education policy among school actors. Movements of opposition have emerged in different countries, especially in those contexts with high-stakes accountability systems. However, this phenomenon has not been analyzed in soft accountability systems. The objective of this…

In "Can Education Change Society?" (Apple, 2013), Apple described a number of tasks in which the critical scholar/activist needs to engage. Among them are telling the truth about what is happening in the creation of inequalities, illuminating spaces of possibility, and acting as the critical secretary of the movements and people who…

The article challenges the deficit view in which education in the Arab region is portrayed by examining the process of educational regionalisation. It takes as its case study the Arab Regional Agenda for Improving Educational Quality in order to explore the construction of an educational quality space that uses data as a governance model. Drawing…

This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries…

In Someone Has to Fail, Labaree (2010) offers an admirably concise overview of the history and promise of education reform in the United States, combining insights from the history of education, policy studies, and a refreshingly accurate and nuanced account of what it is like to actually manage a classroom environment. While in this essay we…

This paper surveys the delivery of school education in Chile over the last half-century. It focuses on evidence provided by recent academic studies on the impact of neoliberal education policies introduced by the military regime in the 1980s, and continued by successive democratic governments. It offers insights into recent popular critiques of…

In 1998 the World Bank published a "Reform Agenda" for higher education in the new millennium designed to accelerate privatization and the restructuring of the academic workforce. Before analyzing the report, I consider how changes in Canadian universities reflect the growth of the "knowledge-based economy." I then provide a…

In the last few decades, in the wake of three major crises in political faith and the overall instability that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao Chinese government has sought to improve the lives of its citizens and to restore political legitimacy through rapid economic growth that has focused almost exclusively on GDP.…

In a recent contribution to this journal, John O'Neill (2011) argues that recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling are evidence of a small, but growing, influence of neo-liberalism on New Zealand's public education. The focus in his paper is on the active enablement of non-government provision of public education through, for…

Incorporating data from two years of ethnographic teacher-research, this article explores how a curriculum of "professionalism" resonates with teachers and students in a small New York City school of choice. Using the literature on Critical Whiteness Studies and philanthrocapitalism in the context of New York City Mayor Michael…

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public…

Teach for America (TFA) is perceived as a major player in the education wars over the future of public schools, and a key ally of those who disparage teacher unions and schools of education, and who are enamored of entrepreneurial reforms that bolster the privatization of a once-sacred public responsibility. But what exactly is TFA's role in these…

The election of the Labour Government headed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, on the 1st May 1997 presaged changes to the world of Education in England and Wales which few working inside education had anticipated. Blair, describing himself and the politics he represented as "New Labour", declared that the priority for the incoming…

Not long after the political transition in 1997, Hong Kong witnessed a spate of top-down education reforms that had been conceived within the neoliberal ideology of economic globalisation. Neoliberalism is particularly pervasive here, because of the underdevelopment of representative politics and of critical, social democratic discourse in…

Contends that the Bush Administration's "America 2000" plan is a political and ideological statement that substitutes the logic of the market for the principles of democracy and ignores the need for multiculturalism in the schools. Provides some general recommendations for educational reform. (30 endnotes) (MLF)