Argues that choice, diversity, and equity are key organizing concepts of the neoliberal public domain. As such, they are implicated in the failure of neoliberalism to address the central predicaments of the age. Articulates a new vision of a learning democracy expressed through civic cooperation, participation, and justice. (MJP)

The story of England's 1988 Education Reform Act is a sad account of a government's efforts to introduce educational innovations based on a political agenda. The result was teacher demoralization and at least 500 million pounds wasted on the national curriculum and its assessment. ERA's real aim was to encourage parental choice and open up…

School choice is the right of parents to decide where their children will attend school, regardless of residential school district boundaries. According to E. Marciniak (1989), the primary reason for advocating school choice was lack of progress in public school reform during the 1980s. The rationale for school choice is based on two assumptions:…

This book demonstrates that liberal policy cannot adequately address deep-seated assumptions and traditional practices that undermine minorities and women in schools. Chapters focus on educational policy and its implementation at all levels of school politics in the United States, Australia, and Israel. Part 1, "Cutting Across Race and…

American educational policy is based on three preeminent values: equity, efficiency, and choice. The problem is that these values are often antithetical: an emphasis on one deemphasizes the others. Coming to an acceptable balance among all three values is therefore the essence of public policymaking. Accordingly, this paper takes one of these…

This paper asserts that government responsibilities in education and the strong connection of Americans with their public schools are being tested, as a network of Religious Right groups, free-market economists, ultraconservative columnists, and others use vouchers as a vehicle to achieve their ultimate goal of privatizing education. Their…

Research suggests that policy change can best be understood as the product of competition among advocacy coalitions within the constraints of a policy subsystem (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993). This paper presents findings of a study that examined the rhetoric of policy change in Texas utilizing the voucher and charter-schools movements as an…

In April 2003, Colorado passed H.B. 1160, thus becoming the first state to enact a school voucher law in the wake of the landmark ruling in favor of school vouchers by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2002. As expected, the Colorado law was immediately challenged in court. In December 2003, a state court declared the voucher program unconstitutional…

In 1993-94, Ohio implemented an interdistrict open-enrollment policy, allowing student transfers only to adjacent districts. Districts can be open or closed, but cannot prevent transfers. A 1994 survey found that open districts were small, rural, racially homogeneous districts with declining enrollment. Closed districts were suburban, with…

Neoconservative advocates of private and religious school choice are trying to exploit the dissatisfactions of poor, predominantly minority parents to create a publicly funded private school system free of public control and oversight. This alternative system would inevitably reproduce and legally sanction the "separate but equal"…

Attempting to grade Lamar Alexander's first year in office, this article assigns a "D" for the U.S. Education Secretary's seeming ignorance of funding cuts, teacher layoffs, inappropriate materials and resources, inadequate or unsafe school buildings comprising the "real world of education." Lamar also fares dismally for…

Summarizes a study examining the impact of England's 1988 Education Reform Act on a group of 138 parents whose children (first-year students) would be most affected. The success of Britain's educational reform is debatable. Although parents are happy with their children's schools, they have reservations about governmentally imposed changes. (19…

An examination of education-reform efforts in 50 states for the period 1983-87 found widespread adoption of reforms that were designed to increase state authority over education policymaking. The few decentralizing efforts contrasted sharply with the near universality of the centralizing reforms. This paper presents findings of a study that…

Most political scientists argue that the term "public policy" encompasses both the actions of government and the intentions that determine those actions. This paper presents an overview of theories about the sources of impetus for policy changes, reviews public policy formation about school choice at the national level and in California,…

In Pioneer Institute's November 1995 "Dialogue," nine school-choice advocates critiqued a draft manuscript of "Who Chooses, Who Loses? Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice," edited by Harvard professors Richard Elmore, Gary Orfield, and Bruce Fuller. This publication contains the response of Professor Fuller to the…