A provision of India's Right to Education Act requires private schools to enrol 25% of children from 'disadvantaged' and 'economically weaker' backgrounds. Described as a unique public-private partnership, this policy has been widely debated for its promotion of private actors in ensuring equity and access to education. Within this controversial…

This paper applies ideas that emanate from the Global North, concerning neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality, to the case of marketisation in South Africa. It also attends to the limits of Northern ideas that are both intellectual undertakings and policy manifestations. In the first part of the paper, we identify how rationales for school…

This article draws on data from two recently completed Economic and Social Research Council funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities in choice of school and choice of childcare. The authors argue that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice…

We apply propensity score matching to the estimation of differential school effectiveness between the publicly funded private sector and the public sector in a sample of 26 countries. This technique allows us to distinguish between school choice and school effectiveness processes and thus to account for selectivity issues involved in the…

In this study, the authors make use of an unusual property of a data set from Bogota--whereby some teachers teach math to more than one group of students--to determine the roles of teacher quality, peer group composition, and class size. They show that all three have effects on student achievement. They also show that the average attributes of…

Today's competitive climate is pressuring public school educators to improve schools in an environment dominated by parent and consumer choice. This article draws on two studies involving Australian principals that illustrate difficult ethical situations. Most participants found the values of marketing and economic rationalism to be inconsistent…