For decades, there has been a well-coordinated effort to unmake public education in Canada and around the globe. Neoliberal reformers have undermined public education through increased privatization, marketization, and managerialism. Government austerity measures have shaped policy that falsely necessitates, validates, and legitimizes the…

The neoliberal turn has driven attempts to marketize education, but how does marketization occur? In this article I draw on ethnographic and linguistic-ethnographic methods to investigate marketization through a microanalytic lens. My investigation focuses on a team of educational professionals, who participated in a workshop led by an…

In this study, I inquire into Teacher Ambassador Programs through the utilization of theoretical concepts such as aspirational labor (Duffy, 2017), capital (Bourdieu, 1984; 1986), and cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011). I describe how women are produced to aspire for neoliberal capitalist subject positions, such as the "good enough woman…

K-12 public education finance policy in the province of British Columbia, Canada, responsibilises school district administrators to engage in competitive entrepreneurial practices, not only to increase public funding, but also to generate supplementary funding from private sources. We focus specifically on the generation of revenue from…

This is the second of three articles on "Sources of Authority in Education". All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of Education Reform in the United States as part of what Pasi Sahlberg terms the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This movement is based…

Performance-based funding (PBF) for public colleges and universities is increasingly prevalent worldwide, as a part of a broader pattern of marketisation in public education. This study focused on developing an empirical view of how, and in what contexts, policy makers use the concepts of neoliberal economics to design and support PerformanceBased…

In the present moment of global capitalism, the marketisation of higher education is a reality in the Global South and North. Yet, the Southern experience of marketisation differs from that of the North. This article examines how market-based development in Sri Lanka since the economic liberalisation of 1977 has reshaped Sri Lankan university…

Focussing on the ideological aspects of privatisation, this paper explores ways in which "freedom" has been activated discursively to justify actions involving changes to both the structure and the content of formal education in the UK. Empirically, the paper will analyse examples in England of UK Government "new provider"…

If we want to combat contemporary "neoliberal" attacks on universities, we should start by refusing the way that their pseudo-rationalities already determine so many aspects of the intellectual and institutional regimes that we consider under threat. This paper sketches an analysis of those aspects of the internal practices of academia…

Since 2010, the number of urban Chinese high-school students applying to US universities has rapidly grown. Many of these students have chosen emerging international curriculum programs established by elite public high schools in China. These programs prepare wealthy Chinese students for the US college application process by exposing them to an…

With its shift to a market economy gathering speed from the 1990s, the Chinese Government embarked on an agenda that brought neoliberal forces into almost all sectors including education. The policies underpinned China's spectacular economic growth, but in education have had consequences that arguably are problematic. Drawing on a mixed-methods…

Neoliberalism is often addressed by commentators and critics as a set of ideas or a doctrine. This article considers neoliberalism as a set of financial practices and exchanges--as about money and profit--and goes on to suggest that as practitioners, researchers, activists we need to understand and engage with that logic and its mechanisms.…

Drawing on interview data from a study of one School Sport Partnership (SSP) in north-west England, this paper examines (from the perspective of teachers): (1) some of the ways in which the SSP programme facilitated the increasing use of sports coaches to deliver aspects of physical education (PE) in state primary schools in England and (2) how…

This paper analyzes President Obama's education policies as they relate to charter schools. The authors first show how his policies continue previous neoconservative and neoliberal educational initiatives that marketize schooling. Arne Duncan's role in charter schools, both in his capacity as former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and in his…