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,…

How has education for refugees been shaped by broader dynamics of educational privatization? This paper argues that the invoking of the 'refugee crisis' narrative has been a crucial force in facilitating the privatization of this sector. The urgency of crisis helps to naturalize private actors' participation in refugees' education as equal…

Higher education in America, still thought to be the world leader, is in crisis. University students are falling behind their international peers in attainment, while suffering from unprecedented student debt. For over a decade, the realm of American higher education has been wracked with self-doubt and mutual recrimination, with no clear…

Today the requirements in higher education are vast and majority of the population in the country cannot afford higher education as their per capita income is very low. Neither the government nor the private sector alone can cater to the requirements of higher education. It is in this context, one should look at the scope, feasibility,…

This article reviews the development of Private Finance Initiative schemes in the United Kingdom, and reflects on how profitable opportunities for private financiers and construction companies were created at the expense of the public sector. (Contains 72 notes.)

Neo-liberal policies and programs regarding higher education operate to fulfill either one of two main goals. The first is the privatization of public education. The second objective is the creation of an "iron cage" of economic rationality and standardization, which functions to regulate the production of human capital in the public education…

Under the New Policy Agenda, international development institutions have promoted non-profit organizations (NPOs) in developing countries, on a dual logic: firstly, they deliver social services more efficiently than the state; secondly, they mitigate equity concerns around privatization of basic social services by reaching out to the poor. Based…

Examines the trend away from independent college bookstores and toward outsourcing bookstores to large corporations, thereby sacrificing independence for cost efficiencies. Discusses effects of the profit motive, fear of competition, fear of declining services by private companies, criticisms of high prices, and concerns about book selection.…

The last five years have seen a significant increase in the involvement of the private sector in the core areas of education delivery and not just in the provision of educational support services. This growing involvement of the private sector in education has been commented on in the press and in debates on education, but it is often…

The increased marketisation and privatisation of schooling in economically developing countries struggling to achieve Education for All and Millennium Development Goals warrants a focused examination of the phenomenon. However, there is little work on the nature and extent of private provision in countries that, on the one hand, are striving to…

India demonstrates many features characteristic of private higher education in much of the world. Among these features are proportional size, with roughly 30 percent of total enrollment, and fast growth. Also rather typical is finance, which comes almost exclusively from non-government sources, principally tuition, while public higher education is…

Describes Wall Street's growing interest in private education companies. Discusses the parallels between the emerging education industry of today and the fledgling health care industry of the 1970s. The acronym EMO (education management organization) is used to categorize companies that manage entire schools. Describes the niches created by the…

One of the salient concerns in contemporary higher education internationally is access, which is rapidly expanding. Another salient trend is the rapid expansion of private higher education. These two salient tendencies have not been treated in scholarship as heavily intertwined. Much of the reason is that many people associate "private"…

Examines Hartford, Connecticut's experiment with contracting out the entire management of its 32 schools. Data analysis involved examining relevant documents, and interviewing key school officials, the staff of the private school-management agency, and community representatives. The experiment met with considerable opposition and eventually…

This guide offers an objective framework for deciding whether self-operation or contract management (also known as privatization or "outsourcing") will best serve the goals and objectives of an individual institution of higher education. The guide is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 briefly outlines the evolution of contract…