Globalization has emerged as a buzzword in a number of disciplines in recent years. The most recent wave of globalization is characterized by an increase in economic deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment policies, finance flows, global public debates, immigration, multiculturalism, and the technology revolution. In this paper, the…

With public colleges and universities facing substantial budget cuts and increased calls for accountability, more institutions now rely on private revenue streams for support. As market-driven policies and behaviors become more commonplace, some cautious critics sound the alarm, while others watching the bottom line cheer. But which perspective…

This note claims that contracting in education can be employed for initiatives of varying sizes and across a range of services. For policy-makers, contracting represents an effective means of introducing accountability in the education system. Contracting can also insulate governments from some of the criticism leveled at privatization. Moreover,…

This article discusses the Greek Parliament's controversial education bill passed recently that sparked riots and unrest in Athens. The government's controversial education package includes measures that would limit the number of years students can take to complete a university degree and would curtail university asylum laws. A separate proposal…

The unprecedented extent of privatisation of provision in the school system on a for-profit basis is clearly one of the most significant transformations accomplished by the Blair government. However, another aspect of private sector involvement has proved much more problematic: the direct involvement of employers in the formation of the future…

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political…

Breaking new ground in studies of business involvement in schooling, this book dissects the most powerful educational reforms and highlights their relationship to the rise of powerful think tanks and business groups. Over the past several decades, there has been a strong movement to privatize public schooling through business ventures. At the…

Recently, Latin America has seen the advent of research activities to meet the call for research that long preceded them and of the full-time research faculty who engage in them. These developments have taken place as the region partakes in contemporary worldwide trends that have affected universities elsewhere: the consequences of the increased…

Efforts to infuse market forces into public education are based on the supposition that these forces can improve student outcomes. This assumption does not consider the politics of implementation. This article examines state-initiated school privatization and reveals factors that influence translation of theory to practice. The cases depict what…

Supplemental Educational Services, mandated by NCLB as an option for students in low-performing Title I schools, has just completed its fourth implementation year, and a number of solid research reports on the Federal program are now available. This commentary reviews the political background to the out-of-school tutoring program, the for-profit…

As public schools in countries like the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand continue to suffer from the damaging effects of poorly conceptualized educational reforms, educators struggle to come up with alternatives with which to reclaim schools. While acknowledging the situational, contextual and temporal differences between these…

The authors of the articles in this issue have provided a descriptive, analytic view of the politics of privatization, not a normative one. They have elected to view privatization more as a basic tool of government, with both uses and limitations, than strictly as an issue of ideology. Through their examination of the nexus between privatization…

Supporters of public education fear attempts to privatize schools, while the private sector has always struggled against the monopolistic power of the public schools that educates almost 90% of all K-12 students. This trepidation has recently been intensified by the creation of a "third sector" that includes charter schools, voucher…

This article is a compilation of the views of 16 PhD students and the author on Steven Klees' 2007 article titled, "A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: Misleading analyses and failed policies." The students and the author have taken Klees' article as a stimulus to try and explicate the anatomy of the decline of the…

A National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report addresses the questions "What have conservative foundations done with their grant dollars to promote concepts of privatizing public education through "school choice," primarily linked to school vouchers? What were their strategies in providing resources to an array of conservative…