This study explores the ways in which the democratic notion of "the people" may be enacted in the school choice arena. Through an investigation of a charter school movement in a rural and segregated district in the Deep South, we explore themes of the constituent paradox that enabled the community to move beyond individual interests…

Inherently, populism questions elite values and expertise; thus, populists oppose and usually are opposed by elites. Here, I discuss how American Political Science treats elitism, pluralism, and populism, relying heavily on the U.S. Founders' constitutional approaches limiting the power of factions to impose social and political uniformity.…

Education researchers and political scientists have long raised theoretical objections to market-based reforms like school choice on the grounds that these policies may undermine public participation in democratic politics and erode public support for public institutions like schools. Little work, however, has empirically tested this claim.…

Charter schools are promoted as a contemporary American invention. But the documented history reveals that charter schools actually evolved over the centuries in England, structured to reflect the highly stratified British class system. The last stand to hold onto the charter-school system in England was waged by Margaret Thatcher under the banner…

The article analyses a new educational development in Poland, that is, free democratic schools, which are grassroots initiatives of parents seeking an alternative to the traditional pedagogies of the public schooling. These schools form a broader network. Based on ethnographic research carried out at eight such schools over five years, the authors…

An article of empirically informed philosophical analysis of charter schooling that features local histories, voices of stakeholders, and an optimistic view on the democratic potential of charter school policies, the original piece presents a compelling, if extreme, case of charter school formation. In this response, I offer an alternative…

In the Netherlands, state and religious schools are equally financed by the government. Parents are free to choose a school that optimally fits their moral values as well as their idea of a good education. As a result, there is a huge variety of schools, which include those orthodox Reformed schools that form part of the so-called Bible Belt…

Educational grievances made educational democratisation an important issue in the 1980s and 1990s during South Korea's democratic consolidation. Educational democratisers sought to address these through greater freedom and autonomy for teachers, students and parents combined with teacher unionisation. Some of the excesses of the highly…

In 2018, the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation issued a report entitled "Grading the States." That report examined America's commitment to democracy by grading each state and the District of Columbia on the number of publicly-funded but privately-governed educational "choice" programs it had and whether…

India and the United States are the largest democracies in the world, and since the 1990s, both countries have implemented neoliberal economic reforms into most of their social institutions-- including their education systems. Even though both countries have long-established commitments to public education as a means for socio-economic…

This exploration of Phi Delta Kappan's archives shows how the magazine has covered questions related to the purposes, governance, and funding of the public schools. Articles have discussed the role of schools in a democratic society, how schools should relate to the public, whether public funds should be diverted to private and religious schools,…

This article brings together ethnographies of two privileged educational settings in the United States--a private school in California's Central Valley following the progressivist Sudbury model, and an affluent New England boarding school's summer enrichment program. Each of these institutions serves as an alternative to and/or extension of…

In this article the author revisits an important book: Brian Simon's "Bending the Rules: the Baker reform of education." Written by a key figure in the history of the journal FORUM as well as in the history of education, Simon's book documented the features of the Education Reform Bill of 1987 (the precursor to the Education Reform Act…

In this paper, I share the findings of my qualitative study of parental choice processes that reflected an intricate system of advantages and resulted in the creation and maintenance of increasingly segregated, like-minded school communities. Drawing on Dewey's conceptions of public and private and of democratic education, I argue that the…

In almost any conversation about accountability for private schools, accountability for public schools is assumed. This is a dangerous myth. By assuming that the edifice that states and the federal government have created over the past several decades actually holds schools accountable, school choice advocates immediately find themselves in an…