Across Canada, school districts have been confronting a backlash to their equity and social justice initiatives. Critics of public education have been arguing that the solution to these controversies is to increase school choice. Using several examples from the United States, this paper argues that the endgame of these strategies is to undermine…

Privatization of education has expanded dramatically worldwide in the last two decades, and Turkey is no exception. It is seen that the developments affecting the transformation of public services began with the implementation of neoliberal education policies, especially after the 1980s. These policies have led to a significant transformation in…

This paper focused on public funding to private providers of compulsory education in the context of globalisations. It analyses the differences and the common points between Brazil and Portugal (from 2014 to 2017) regarding the type of private providers in education, the mechanics and the reasons linked to the public funding to compulsory…

This paper draws on current international analysis of pandemic issues in education, and on recent arguments by critical economists and political scientists, to examine two scenarios for educational policy beyond the coronavirus pandemic. One looming possibility is an onrush of austerity, deep cuts to public education, financial hardship for the…

Public education is a public good. It provides students with skills to take part in society and the economy. It gives students access to culture and traditions, as well as exposure beyond a narrow personal experience. But public education has broader social purposes and contributions as well. It is the basis for social benefits that are of value…

Over the last decades privatization policies have taken centre stage in many processes of educational reform globally. In Latin America, these policies have played an important role since the 1990s leading to an increasing participation of private agents in educational provision. The case of Uruguay stands out for having remained somehow apart…

Low-fee private schools (LFPS) educate some of India's poorest children. They have grown dramatically over the last decade in India and have changed the country's educational landscape (Srivastava, 2016), yet there is little conclusive evidence that the schools significantly help their students. Our study aims to better understand why and how the…

This paper aims to discuss recent changes in Portugal's education policy. Portugal offers an interesting scenario to study the different ways the economic crisis has brought new opportunities to strengthen the privatization agenda. We specifically focus on media coverage and the contractualization of education services with private schools through…

Education privatization is a global trend that has nonetheless followed multiple trajectories. This article addresses the question of what explains this variation by demonstrating the role that political coalitions play in the re-interpretation of global privatization ideas. A political-coalitional approach helps us analyze from a long-term…

This article, written in December 2016 following the election in May 2016 of a majority Conservative government, and the election to the leadership of the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing social democrat, "Old Labour style socialist", revises and updates substantially a previous article of June 2015 published in this journal…

The phenomenon of low-cost private schools "mushrooming" in poor areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and elsewhere, is now well-documented. Findings from research by the author's teams and others show that these schools are serving a majority (urban and peri-urban) or significant minority (rural) of the poor, including…

Private schools were very prosperous in Shanghai during the Republican period. Shanghai Municipal Educational Bureau adopted a pattern of indirect management, especially attaching importance to normalizing and guiding the mechanism for operating a school by taking the basic measures for the registration administration. Meanwhile, appropriate…

Purpose: The purpose of research is to attempt to determine to what extent the salary level of teachers working in public educational systems is connected with the trend towards privatization considering that privatization has become nowadays a prominent phenomenon in educational systems around the world. Design/methodology/approach: A secondary…

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…

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…