The task of this article is to carry out a synthetic analysis of the concept of the "educational marketplace" as it is used in the popular discourse of education reform so as to unpack what has become a commonsensical idea in American politics. It is a conceptual framework that has opened an ever-expanding sovereign space in the American state for…

Recent reforms in England's education system have been justified on the grounds that other countries have pursued similar approaches to education reform. Many such policies that by-pass or otherwise diminish meso-level institutions demonstrate a commitment to the idea of devolving authority to local actors. The current reforms in England and…

This paper explores the social justice implications of two, "linked", governance developments which have been instrumental in reshaping many education systems throughout the world: the "privatising" and "globalising" of education (Klees, Stromquist, & Samoff, 2012). We argue that such education governance…

As charter schools multiply, public school teachers and administrators need to understand the policy landscape in which charters are skimming money from their traditional local public schools, making scarce resources even scarcer. In this essay, the author discusses a related phenomenon that is part of some school reform plans--the reconstitution…

More than 150 years ago Horace Mann persuasively reasoned that education is the "balance wheel" of the social structure. He argued that education should be free and universal. While much progress has been made in establishing a universal education system since Mann spoke those words, substantial disparities in educational resources,…

This article argues that how we think about education must extend far beyond matters of schooling and include those spaces, practices, discourses and maps of meaning and affect produced through a range of cultural and pedagogical technologies. We live at a time in which the educational influence of the larger culture has become the major force in…

This paper presents a framework informed by spatial models of politics to explain the dynamics of political competition in higher education policy and, in particular, the observed instability in the relationship between political variables and policy outcomes. To this end, I explore competing hypotheses for the relationship between government…

This article examines the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism and education policy in Chicago. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race, the author argues that education is constitutive of material and ideological processes of neoliberal restructuring, its…

Over the last almost two decades, high-stakes testing has become increasingly central to New York's schools. In the 1990s, the State Department of Education began requiring that secondary students pass five standardized exams to graduate. In 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act required students in grades three through eight to take math and…

An institutional analysis is presented of the policy, political, and legislative events associated with the failure of an attempt in 2006 by the state of Maryland to take control of 11 schools in Baltimore City and turn them over to independent managers or into charter schools under No Child Left Behind. The place of the failed…

Studying community engagement provides another lens for examining how neoliberal universities collaborate with external organizations to move closer to the market, often in the hope of promoting the public good. This study examined the tension between the public and private aspects of university-community partnerships by studying the impact of…

In his essay "Individuality, Equality, and Creative Democracy--the Task Before Us," Jim Garrison (2012, in this issue) restates Dewey's call "to educate individuals capable of criticizing and recreating society--not simply reproducing the status quo." He writes that under the new structural feudalism, "schools assume the…

The consequences of neoliberal policies in education are controversial. Based on the micro-political approach, this study had two aims: (1) to examine teachers' attitudes toward the effect of privatization on inequality and educational improvement; and (2) to examine the link between teachers' positions of power in school and their attitudes…

"Education and the Crisis of Public Values" examines American society's shift away from democratic public values, the ensuing move toward a market-driven mode of education, and the last decade's growing social disinvestment in youth. The book discusses the number of ways that the ideal of public education as a democratic public sphere has been…

This article ethnographically examines the ways in which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) links local practices to the centralized processing of data through its narrowing of procedures and measurements aimed at accountability. Framed by actor-network theory, it draws upon data consistently collected between June 2005 and October 2008, and then…