As challenges to U.S. democracy proliferate, public schools have been caught up in the controversies. Columnist Robert Kim explains that the challenges to both public education and democracy are not new. These attacks occur on multiple fronts, involving funding, equity, and curriculum. And efforts to respond to the threats will require various…

Drawing upon a long-term study of venture philanthropy and public schools in Australia, this paper focuses on Teach For Australia (TFA) as a major component of a venture philanthropic network, one that builds critical infrastructures and connections between non-government organisations and the state, creating a product pipeline into public…

Unions have played a decisive role in promoting democracy and social justice in Tunisia. In 2023, two teacher unions led a yearlong 'silent strike' of withholding student marks from administration. Based on interviews with 60 teachers, this article analyses teacher views on the unions and on ongoing protests. While unions are still considered the…

As the privatisation of the public sector has grown rapidly in Sweden in the last decade, private companies have become an imperative part of education. Private companies sell and deliver consultancy, hardware, software, services, etc. to schools and municipalities. This study examines a growing rate of activities from companies and businesses…

In many nations around the globe, including Pakistan, education is losing ground as a public good to become another market-based commodity as the state shrinks its responsibility to schooling. This presents challenges to democratic futures, and particularly for young democratic states such as Pakistan. The government of Pakistan is pouring a…

The current movement toward increasing privatization in general and market education in particular has been extensively examined in terms of its neoliberal roots and incompatibility with the aims of public, democratic education. This analysis presents a different critique, one that draws upon current economic theory and research to challenge the…

This article considers how the development of for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) technologies fosters the privatization of public education and erodes the values and practices of democratic education. The introduction situates the advent of digital technologies in the context of the structural economic and ideological shifts of the past 40…

In the 2016-2017 school year, the Liberian government launched Partnership Schools For Liberia (PSL), a pilot program in which the management of 93 primary schools was transferred to 8 private contractors. The pilot owed much to the importation of western policy models and was facilitated by the British organisation ARK and involved BIA, a private…

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…

Democracy and higher education are inextricably linked: universities not only have the ability to be key arbiters of how democracy is advanced, but they also need to reflect democratic values in their practices, objectives, and goals. Framed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing crisis of structural racism, "Higher Education for…

The republican political tradition, which originated in Ancient Rome and picked up by several early-modern thinkers, has been revived in the last couple of decades following the seminal works of historian Quentin Skinner and political theorist Philip Pettit. Although educational questions do not normally occupy the center stage in republican…

In this article I discuss the vision of education for liberation during the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. The article focuses specifically on "People's Education" and "Workers' Education". Instead of an instrumental role for education reduced solely to the labour market requirements of business, economic growth and…

The authors consider how globalisation has fundamentally reshaped education. The assumption that in a knowledge economy workers need to be better educated has led to the belief that education is a private good. What the authors define as "responsibilisation" frames a radically different vision of public life from that of the past. The…

How do market-driven reforms and the privatization of public education reshape the professional identities of teachers and school leaders? This timely and accessible book examines two waves of business influence that created models of schooling that are out of touch with the experiences of students, the professional expertise of teachers, and the…

We currently live in an era of neoliberalism where privatization and profit are held up as political ideals. The ascendency of this ideology threatens the notion that public schools can serve not only as institutions that supply credentials but also as institutions that lay the building blocks for American democracy. This essay argues that teacher…