In statehouses and cities across the country, battles are raging over the direction of education policy--from the standards that will shape what students learn to how test results will be used to judge a teacher's performance. Students and teachers, in passive resistance, are refusing to take and give standardized tests. Protesters have marched to…

Given recent budgetary gaps in public education, many civic and educational leaders have relied upon private sources of funding for US public schools, including funds raised by parents. Yet parents' role as economic actors in public education has been largely unexplored. Drawing from a qualitative study of parent engagement, fundraising, and…

According to James Harvey, the scale of the 2011 effort to privatize public education through vouchers and charters is "staggering," representing the culmination of a 30-year assault on public service in general and public education in particular. At a time when states are staring into the abyss of bankruptcy, he notes, public funds intended for…

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…

Policymakers worldwide are trying to figure how best to organize, govern, and support their education systems. They must manage multiple goals, such as workforce development, nurturing knowledgeable citizens, and ensuring educational opportunity. Some countries approach these issues with a public investment in teacher professionalization and a…

This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries…

Teachers in England and Wales are involved in the largest campaign of industrial action since the mid-1980s. At the heart of their grievances are government plans to abolish a national framework for teachers' pay and the removal of important safeguards relating to working conditions. Wider questions of workload and pensions are also involved. This…

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…

Introduced to the British education system under the Education Act 2002 and later enshrined in the New Labour government White Paper "Higher Standards, Better Schools for All" (DfES, 2005), the Academies policy was set up to enable designated under-performing schools to "opt out" from the financial and managerial remit of Local…

This paper argues that English education policy has come full-circle--from the first constitution of a state system of education in 1870 to the beginning of the end of state education in 2010--and that this circularity can be understood in relation to the reluctant state. That is, in the nineteenth century, the English state hesitantly and slowly…

This paper surveys the delivery of school education in Chile over the last half-century. It focuses on evidence provided by recent academic studies on the impact of neoliberal education policies introduced by the military regime in the 1980s, and continued by successive democratic governments. It offers insights into recent popular critiques of…

ISCHE 33 was convened in San Luis Potosi to re-examine a relationship--that between society, education and the state--that had been largely taken for granted in official histories of education of modern nations. This theme was inspired by the bicentenary celebrations of the relatively early nineteenth-century movements (from 1804 to 1824) that…

This article examines youth protests against education privatization in the post-Soviet countries of Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine. Drawing on a sample of online sources and scholarly articles, this study uses critical discourse analysis and visual methodologies to examine why and how post-Soviet university students have organized to protest against…

This research brief details some of the prominent ways that individuals, companies, and organizations secure financial gain and generate profit by controlling and running charter schools. To illustrate how charter school policy functions to promote privatization and profiteering, the authors explore differences between charter schools and…

For-profit education is not a new focus for public schools in the United States. It has been around for several decades, has stimulated considerable controversy, and has been heralded by some as a panacea for improving learning for the nation's public school students. For-profit schools are run by private, for-profit companies or organizations…