Of all Tony Blair's education policies during his decade as prime minister, one of the most controversial was his plan to create a network of academies--effectively, private schools funded by the taxpayer. This piece explores the origins of the policy and recounts the widespread concerns and criticisms with which it has been beset.

School choice programs have proliferated around the world since the 1980s. Following this international trend, the Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) was launched in 1991 to revitalize Hong Kong's private school sector. DSS schools receive a similar subsidy per student to that received by aided schools, but they may charge fees and have greater control…

This study examines and chronicles the change in public funding for postsecondary education in Colorado from 1970 to 2010. Colorado was ranked sixth among states in per capita funding for public higher education in 1970 and declined to 48th in 2010. The study analyzed state appropriations over this time period in five broad categories of spending:…

Nearly ten years ago, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would outsource its facilities and real-estate operations to Trammell Crow Higher Education Services, Inc. The agreement included management of school facilities--155 buildings over 269 acres on the West Philadelphia campus. It also included construction management and…

Critical Small Schools: Beyond Privatization in New York City Urban Educational Reform features the most current empirical research about the successes and challenges of the small schools movement and the implications of such for urban public educational policy. Situated in a climate of hierarchical reform, many of the principles of the original…

There are very real barriers to using people, time, money, and technology well in today's public schools systems. To begin to break down these barriers, the Education Resource Strategies (ERS) has created a framework to prioritize seven urgent restructuring priorities. The authors have found that these areas represent the largest opportunities for…

Billions of education dollars are trapped each year. At this time of continued budget shortfalls when every dollar spent on education must yield maximum returns in student outcomes--states are frequently tying the hands of districts. While funding adequacy and equity must remain a priority for states, ensuring that limited resources are used as…

Studies of existing best practices cannot determine whether the current "best" schooling practices could be even better, less costly, or more effective and/or improve at a faster rate, but we can discover a cost effective menu of schooling options and each item's minimum cost through market accountability experiments. This paper describes…

Neoliberalism has brought a privatization trend that has deeply affected the structure of the educational system of countries. While public schools lag behind, new forms of private schooling have arisen creating different forms of inequality. Nonetheless, in Chile the major inequality exists between schools attended by low and middle income…

A policy sociology approach is taken to examine the connections between neo-liberalism, post-secondary provincial education (PSE) policy in Canada and the impact of those policies. Our thesis regarding the broad political economy of PSE is that over the last two decades the adoption of this ideology has been a major cause of some dramatic changes…

The impetus for this study was an article by N. Pokrovskii (2005) describing tendencies in higher education in the United States that seem promising, as they flow objectively from globalization processes and are characteristic of the whole globalizing world. As Pokrovskii is a highly qualified sociologist with a good knowledge of the system of…

This study explores two aspects of the privatization of childhood in contemporary urban China: the emergent discourse on children's privacy and children's growing seclusion within the home. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author describes urban caregivers' engagement with the issue of children's privacy, and argues that we are now…

Sourcing decisions for information services departments have become an integral part of every school's IT strategy. Much has been written on what areas to outsource, which partner to select, and how to negotiate contracts and service agreements. In this article, the author shares the operational lessons learned by Tulane University during the…

This paper analyzes the relationship between neoliberalism and school restructuring in Chicago. I provide an account of the ideological foundation of neoliberal education policies as well as an account of their development and implementation in the city. Additionally, I analyze Chicago's newest education agenda, Renaissance 2010. Passed into law…

Education management organizations, or EMOs, emerged in the early 1990s in the context of widespread interest in so-called market-based school reform proposals. Wall Street analysts coined the term EMO as an analogue to health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Proponents of EMOs claim that they bring a much needed dose of entrepreneurial spirit…