If, as some have argued, private higher education is now the most dynamic segment of higher education, it is also the case that its growth, partly in response to the increasing mismatch between spiralling demand and limited state capacity, is often ad hoc. The article examines the contours of this trend in Indonesia, where the balance of public…

Since 2004, a number of Canadian provinces have initiated comprehensive reviews of their respective public post-secondary education systems. This paper examines the ways in which these provincial post-secondary education reviews are consistent with the pervasive influence of economic globalization on higher education and a more market-driven and…

Today, American education faces a crisis. It is not too extreme to say that public education hangs in the balance. Anyone who has read the history of American education knows that there have always been critics. But they did not want public education dismantled. They wanted it to be better. Today, however, there are critics who believe that public…

Universities in Latin America and in the Caribbean (LAC), and throughout the world, are facing one of the most challenging eras in their history. Globalization presents many important opportunities for higher education, but also poses serious problems and raises questions about how best to serve the common good. The traditional values of…

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…

In "The Transformation of Great American School Districts", William Lowe Boyd, Charles Taylor Kerchner, and Mark Blyth argue that urban education reform can best be understood as a long process of institutional change, rather than as a series of failed projects. They examine the core assumptions that underlay the Progressive Era model of…

This article reviews educational initiatives of state and federal government that were designed to remedy the effects of racial segregation on Black public school students in the United States after the famous "Brown v. Board of Education" decisions. Several policy and legal initiatives are reviewed, including school desegregation,…

Like many other U.S. cities, Philadelphia experienced a prolonged period of deindustrialization and job loss during the second half of the 20th century. As in other northern cities, the process of suburbanization went hand in hand with white flight, increased racial segregation of the city and its schools, and increasingly inadequate funding of…

The merits of a marketplace model for public education have been among the most prominent themes in education policy discussions over the last two decades. Advocates of market approaches to education reform contend that creating a market in educational services will foster competition among providers and thus spur delivery of better services at…

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…

Western governments appear increasingly dissatisfied with the rising costs and apparent static performance of their education systems. This dissatisfaction has been manifested in a critical re-examination of the near-monopoly of publicly provided schooling. Elsewhere in the public sector, privatization and competitive tendering have been…

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…

As part of its agenda to promote choice, diversity and parent power in education, New Labour is aiming to develop a system of independent non-fee paying state schools. It is envisaged that control of the governing arrangements in such schools will shift from the local authority and be delegated to a range of external partners and sponsors drawn…

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…