This study discusses the impact of neoliberalism on legal education in England and Wales and the challenges and opportunities it presents. Neoliberalism is characterised by a focus on economic efficiency, competition, and individual responsibility, which can result in the commodification of education. The adoption of neoliberal policies in legal…

In 2018, the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation issued a report entitled "Grading the States." That report examined America's commitment to democracy by grading each state and the District of Columbia on the number of publicly-funded but privately-governed educational "choice" programs it had and whether…

We examine the role of ideas in the politics of school choice policy and situate our study within scholarship that understands frames and logics as types of ideas operating in the foreground and background of policy debates. Our data are from a case study of political contention over portfolio management reform (in which a central office oversees…

"Privatization of America's Public Institutions" describes the transformation of the military, K-12 public schools, public universities and colleges, and prisons into enterprises focused on generating profits for a select few. In many cases, privatization has limited accessibility, promoted segregation, fueled declining standards,…

This article presents the author's critiques on Jim Garrison's essay and focuses on Garrison's concerns about the affronts posed to democracy by the standardization and accountability regimes in education. He rightfully highlights a few critical ways by which standardization and accountability in education reflect and reinforce antidemocratic…

The American experiment with charter schools advanced on dual impulses of increasing opportunities for disadvantaged students and unleashing market competition. While critics see these independently managed schools as a form of privatisation, proponents contend that they are public schools because of funding and accountability arrangements and…

More and more nations are losing the ability to control their education systems. OECD is an important premise provider for educational policymaking championing a neoliberal agenda. With the aim to investigate the impact the OECD may have on national policymaking, this paper compares their recent teacher education policies with those of Norway. The…

This article argues that contradictory forces affect teachers' work in the neo-liberal school system in England, with a diversity of governance models alongside increasingly dominant orthodoxies of what constitutes 'effective practice and leadership'. School reforms in England have focused on increasing overall attainment and on closing the…

In the current rush to adopt and expand digital learning, many important considerations are being overlooked that will have major consequences for the future of American public education. As private education technology contractors and vendors move deeper into the work of public education, questions concerning the quality of the services, who is…

More than 150 years ago Horace Mann persuasively reasoned that education is the "balance wheel" of the social structure. He argued that education should be free and universal. While much progress has been made in establishing a universal education system since Mann spoke those words, substantial disparities in educational resources,…

Colonization of public education--the process by which schools are overwhelmed and penetrated by non-educational imperatives--is usually believed to be caused by capitalism and the hegemonic ideological structures it produces. In this paper I argue that in the case of the United States an additional mechanism produces strong colonizing effects:…

During the past year, Wisconsin state legislators debated a series of bills aimed at closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. These proposals were particularly targeted at Milwaukee, the state's largest and poorest school district. Ultimately, the only legislation enacted was a bill that modestly…

In this article we introduce and explain a funding framework for advancing an equity agenda at the community college. The need for the framework is premised on (a) Dowd's observation that the traditional community college commitment to student access no longer suffices as an adequate strategy to achieve greater equity in society and (b) the…

This article reviews educational initiatives of state and federal government that were designed to remedy the effects of racial segregation on Black public school students in the United States after the famous "Brown v. Board of Education" decisions. Several policy and legal initiatives are reviewed, including school desegregation,…

Rejecting the voucher concept for promoting unequal education, this article endorses the "public/private partnership" model of reinvented school governance. Under this system, teachers and administrators remain public employees but are managed by a private company. Jay P. Goldman's sidebar criticizes privatization schemes as unworkable…