A Texas elementary school is testing Edison's claim that a private company can manage a public school better and more profitably than a public school district working alone. Educators and parents already see improvements, but overenrollment has caused class size, scheduling, and computer shortage problems. Competition and payment problems could…

Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, is the site of conflict between the teacher union and the school board. The board has hired Alternative Public Schools, Inc. to manage Turner Elementary School and has given the company permission to hire a new staff at Turner. State legislation may kill the union's court case. (MLF)

Discusses the fall of communism in eastern Europe. Applies Latin America models to eastern Europe. Suggests that revolutions are shaped by the systems against which they are directed. Concludes that the problems of eastern Europe are not caused by the system so much as by geography. Argues that poor capitalism may lie in the future for eastern…

Explores inherent tensions between the substance of school board reform and the ideology of governance reform. New Orleans's unique culture of privatization has historically constrained grass-roots involvement in educational reform. A recent exception is a highly motivated, parent-based Education Issues Committee that successfully overhauled the…

Discusses privatization of noneducational services to help schools and universities cut costs, and presents survey results from public schools and colleges concerning their level and type of outsourcing. Included are reasons for and against privatization, the most common contracts involved, and indications of whether the outsourcing trend will…

Focuses on partnerships between institutions of higher education and private providers of services, particularly as they relate to traditional student affairs functions. Presents examples of successful outsourcing partnerships to illustrate the potential of this type of service provision. (Contains 11 references.) (GCP)

Chester Upland School District, which finished last out of 501 systems in Pennsylvania, is a guinea pig for the private management of public education. Managing 9 of Chester's 10 schools, Edison Schools and its subsidiary Edison/Learn Now is banking on turning around the district with its longer class day, structured curriculum teacher training,…

For more than 10 years, the education community has watched the corporate ups and downs of Edison Schools Inc., the New York City company that has created controversy with its aim of making money from public schools. Long a target of those wary of such aims, the now privately held Edison made headlines with its four-year run as a public company,…

The author of this paper, Matt Bailey, has taught for six years at Northcliffe School, Doncaster, where he is the NUT representative, and Head of Science. A member of the NUT's national working-party on academies, he outlines here the first successful campaign waged by a local community to thwart the imposition of a privately-run Academy in place…

In this article I use the concept of "re-agenting" to explore and explain the role of non-state agencies, principally private companies and business entrepreneurs, as key instruments in the government's transformation of the school system in England. Their role takes both for-profit and not-for-profit forms. The outsourcing to private…

Prior to 1991, all higher education institutions in the Soviet Union were state institutions. There were some 900 higher educational institutions in 1990, including only 70 major universities, still referred to as VUZy, from the Russian "vysshee uchebnoe zavedenie". This acronym is popularly used to refer to all types of higher education…

Homeschooling has developed from a small, isolated, parent-led effort to a vibrant national movement to lobby for and legalize K-12 education at home in all 50 states. Although a majority of homeschool families are Evangelical Christians, the others come from a variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds, giving homeschooling a broad…

In 2003, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) provided Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) with a $3.5 million grant to design and implement a faith- and community-based program for incarcerated juveniles. Florida's experience developing a completely new program has provided valuable lessons regarding…

In Europe a very intensive discussion is in full swing as to whether vocational schools should in future be guided and monitored by the state or whether they should be freed from state dependency. Within the framework of a number of pilot projects in German-speaking countries, vocational school centers are currently testing their autonomy. This…

Dramatic changes are being made to teacher education internationally and in the United States. Some of the alterations have been recognized as threatening university-based teacher preparation, for instance, the growth of alternate route programs. Many other phenomena that have an impact on teacher education have not been analyzed as such,…