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…

In the light of the government's recent White Paper, we outline the history of the academisation programme, positioning it as part of the neo-liberal privatisation drive which has been sustained since the 1988 Education Reform Act under governments of all stripes. We contest central claims made for the supposed benefits of academisation, and call…

Monitoring is an important component of state general supervision systems and typically encompasses various types of activities at different levels of intensity. States must monitor all local education agencies (LEAs) at least once every 6 years. Some states are grappling with the best way to meet this expectation in light of a large number of…

White-label programs in higher education, designed and supported by online program management (OPM) firms, pose unique challenges to current policy. In part this is because OPM firms and services are either exempt from policy or fall into a gray area that policy has not yet considered. Policymakers, however, do not need to develop entirely new…

Global competition results in an overall demand for higher skills. In the competitive world, China has no choice but to adjust themselves to become more efficient, productive, and flexible. Higher education in China has played a key role in achieving socialist economy and modernization. Since the open-door policy in the 1980s, there has been a…

In Trump's America, the profession of education is under attack. The privatization of public schools and the deprofessionalization of professional teachers has become even more dire than in the past. In this article, the authors discuss the need for preparing future teachers to embark on their careers in such an inhospitable time. They believe…

In recent years, the federal government (under Republican and Democratic administrations alike) has encouraged the outsourcing of core parts of public education's work, including testing and test preparation, teaching and tutoring, data collection, and human resources management. However, researchers have found little evidence to support policy…

Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos wants to privatize American education using charter schools, vouchers, tax credit scholarships, education savings accounts, and portable federal funds. Court and legislative decisions are facilitating these ends. Understanding the school choice agenda and its fiscal, academic, and legal aspects can help…

Education privatization has grown in tandem with the spread of neo-liberal ideology around the globe. While the privatization of education is not a new phenomenon, what has changed over the past few decades is the sheer scope, scale and penetration of privatization in the education sector. The Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF) believes strongly…

The Nordic Education Model was an important part of the social democratic welfare state for many years in the second half of the 20th century. Since the millennium, transnational agencies have drawn education from the realm of politics into a global market place by advocating strategies such as efficiency, competition, decentralisation, governing…

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…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced the No Child Left Behind Act with great fanfare and enthusiasm. Granting more power to states and curbing what was seen as federal overreach was well received. However, the new legislation maintains a predominately test-based accountability system with a federal mandate for interventions in well over…

The coupling of literacy and race emphasizes their historic and contemporaneous intersection in literacy research. In this article, I draw on my scholarship and use three counternarratives to articulate how literacy and race significantly influence access, equity, and freedom. First, I examine access within the sociohistoric context of African…

For decades, for-profit educational provision has been merely tolerated, often grudgingly. In the world of charter schooling, for-profit providers are lambasted and sometimes prohibited. In higher education, for-profit institutions have grown rapidly, enrolling millions of nontraditional students and earning enmity, suspicion, and now…

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political…