In the past two decades, the Government of Pakistan has significantly invested in higher education (HE) to bring structural reforms in funding, governance, and quality assurance mechanisms. Their overarching mission has been to fuel national socioeconomic development by ensuring equal access to HE. Given this, the present study aimed to address…

Education market advocates frequently argue that socioeconomically disadvantaged students could be the main beneficiaries of privatization and market policies. However, the international evidence has shown how privatization and pro-market policies have a negative impact in terms of equity, which particularly affect socioeconomically disadvantaged…

The relevance of the researched problem is connected with the high level of economic inequality in Russia. The article goal is to show that the current Russian institutional system is not directed to decrease the economic inequality but on the contrary it continues to make and deepen it. The leading approach to study of this problem is the…

This paper examines the consequences of the new policies of school choice in post-apartheid South Africa and the reasons they have largely failed to achieve greater educational equality--their stated purpose. I argue that the dominant reason for this lies in the continuing inadequate resources of many poor schools and the failure to address them.…

This paper critically analyses key educational policy documents produced by the World Bank mainly from the mid-1980s to 2010 with regard to implementing major educational projects in Nepal. Using critical policy sociology as a methodological tool, the paper explores how a small Himalayan nation with per capita income of about US$730 (2014) plunged…

With international momentum to achieve "Education for All" by 2015, global attention is being paid to those parts of the world where mass formal primary schooling is relatively new. Uganda is such a place. In the context of ethnographic fieldwork at a poor, undocumented, private primary school in rural Uganda, parents were interviewed in…

The phenomenon of low-cost private schools "mushrooming" in poor areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and elsewhere, is now well-documented. Findings from research by the author's teams and others show that these schools are serving a majority (urban and peri-urban) or significant minority (rural) of the poor, including…

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…

Low-attaining schools have been targeted by government for closure and transformation into academies. This article argues that opposition to academies is necessary but not sufficient. It is vital to do more than simply defend the status quo. In the city of Leicester an alternative vision for high-quality education, local authority led and grounded…

This paper focuses on the deregulation of university education in Nigeria, its problems and prospects. The paper commences with the recognition given to education all over the world, especially higher education. Nigeria as a country gives much credence to higher education as the means for social and economic mobility, social transformation, and as…

Using Latin America as a broad context and drawing on evidence from some of its most heavily indebted states as cases, this paper considers the example of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and education as a means of exploring the question of whether poverty reduction strategies of the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the…

One of the relative failures of much of the multicultural education literature is the failure to connect educational inequities with larger sociopolitical conditions. Too often everyone falls into the trap of discussing educational sexism, for instance, as if it is disconnected from global abuses of women's rights. Perhaps nowhere is this…

This article examines equity in national systems of education in terms of differences in student outcomes, as measured by mathematics achievement scores on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003. The author uses four measures for assessing equity in student outcomes: (1) the strength of the relationship between student…

The paper examines the relationship among household agriculture, wages and household structure using panel data on urban households from 1994-2003. Experts using cross-sectional data differ on whether Russian "dachas" or garden houses are a survival strategy that households use in times of economic difficulty or a hobby of the more…

This book explores the connections between infrastructure reform and poverty alleviation in Latin America based on a detailed analysis of the effects of a decade of reforms. The book demonstrates that because the access to, and affordability of, basic services is still a major problem, infrastructure investment will be a core component of poverty…