There are competing popular beliefs about whether education reform is a fundamentally bipartisan or conservative movement. Yet, despite the popularity of these prevariling depictions, there has been minimal effort expended toward systematically observing the political beliefs of the key players in the education reform movement. I gauge the…

This article considers how the development of for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) technologies fosters the privatization of public education and erodes the values and practices of democratic education. The introduction situates the advent of digital technologies in the context of the structural economic and ideological shifts of the past 40…

Frenkiewich and Onosko (2020) maintain that American public education has functioned as a pillar of democracy and a force for progress for most of the twentieth century, but they worry that a major turn to school privatization in recent years will undermine the democratic mission and vision of public schooling and harm society as well. The authors…

The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization…

This authoritative book examines the long-standing campaign that resulted in today's school voucher policies. Advocates of private school vouchers promulgated a vision of service to low-income families, students of color, and other marginalized student populations. Vouchers were sold as a way to advance civil rights. But as voucher policies grew…

Background/Context: This article offers an analysis of the contemporary policy context surrounding teacher education in the United States. It lays out recent policy shifts that have come to frame the field, particularly university-based teacher preparation as "broken," and to fuel forward certain strands of disruptive innovation.…

The globalization of capital implied worldwide consequences, evidencing in the new international division of labor a global imperialist policy in which it is effective through its accumulation by spoliation. Educational policy does not limit its ideological basis only to the local precepts of its National State. From the conjuncture of…

This paper on the political sociology of school choice policies has been written as a supplement to the essays in the 2020 Politics of Education Association Yearbook and locates them in cognate literatures. In addition, the papers are situated against the changing political and global contexts of such policies, as global pressures, discourses, and…

What we understand about the world is determined by what the world is, who we are, and how we conduct our inquiries. Action research privileges the question "why are things as they are?" This article explores how neoliberalism, with its key principle that competition is the defining characteristic of human relations, reshapes our work as…

Teachers' work in Iran has undergone two determining changes since 1979: The Islamicisation of the education system and, consequently, Islamic teacher education, with neoliberal policies, has accelerated in recent years. The authors believe Islamicisation has been integrated into neoliberal policies and together these have shaped teachers'…

This article discusses the expression of neoliberalism in Kazakhstan's emerging higher education system. The central tenets of neoliberalism are briefly articulated. Noted is the phenomenon that the general political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism differs in its specific implementation depending on the particular countries and cultures in…

In her essay, Neoliberalism's Frankenstein, Wendy Brown (2018) unpacks with meticulous depth how the current neoliberal condition valorizes private venture by eroding trust in the meaning of the social. In an attempt to understand, like Michel Foucault (1977), the governing rationality that generates certain kinds of subjects and their conduct,…

In recent years, districts have paid special attention to the common practice of "district hopping," families bending geographic school assignment rules by sending a child to a school in a district where the child does not formally reside-usually to a district that is more desirable because of higher performing schools or greater…

This article aims to demonstrate the hazards of an education system controlled by any one group -- in this case, governments -- by examining the recent drive for the academisation of English state schools. This article highlights the need for education's independence from political control. The once 'secret garden' of the curriculum is now firmly…

In this article I discuss the vision of education for liberation during the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. The article focuses specifically on "People's Education" and "Workers' Education". Instead of an instrumental role for education reduced solely to the labour market requirements of business, economic growth and…