Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. Secretary of Education, has a reform agenda to advance school choice. Her track record includes enabling charter school growth in Michigan at taxpayers' expense with little oversight or accountability. Although an effective advocate, DeVos represents a broader policy movement to privatize American education, much of it…

Over the last year and a half, British Columbians (BC) have worked together to decrease the spread and reduce exposure to COVID-19. BC teachers have risen to the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as it has taken its toll. Teachers are on the front-line of witnessing what is needed to move BC from a crisis response to a longer-term--and…

We focus on describing some of the effects of austerity capitalism in the public educational sector in Poland, a country that was a part of the Soviet bloc from WWII and experienced dramatic transformation after 1989. This transformation from "communism" to "democracy" involved all spheres of the life of society and individuals…

Higher education in Mexico is under an ongoing transition process influenced by global tendencies. The world is changing, and Mexico is striving to fulfill the latest requirements to be part of the "elite universities." Although higher education literature has tracked Mexico's progress, the tension between global tendencies and their…

School reform in the past several decades has taken a "modernist" bent in that it has focused on quantitatively based accountability systems modeled after business (Ravitch, 2013; Tienken & Orlich, 2013). The author uses a model devised by a Finnish scholar to demonstrate that 1) these reforms are indeed modernist, and 2) the private…

Chile is recognized in the educational policy field as one of the first laboratories of neoliberal initiatives. These policies, initiated under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, did not change with the new democratic governments after 1990. This characteristic led international organizations to promote the Chilean policies in different…

Development of any nation solely depends on the quality of human resources and good human resource is produced through quality education. Education provides people with an opportunity to reflect on the social, cultural, moral, economic, and spiritual issues and contributes towards the development through propagation of specialized knowledge and…

This chapter deals with the multiple scales, spaces and places of contemporary education policy reforms. The focus is on new non-state policy actors, namely, international organizations such as the OECD, and edu-businesses such as Pearson. The first case of the OECD's PISA demonstrates the lack of policy learning in relation to international data…

While students chanting "No cuts, No fees, No corporate universities" may be dismissed as youthful hyperbole by some, it is not as superficial a characterisation of the state of our public university system as it seems.

In this speech, Hursh shows how public education in the United States is undergoing profound changes. Education policy has been hijacked by the unelected and unaccountable corporate reformers who aspire to overhaul the education system through a corporate model of privatization and market competition. They aim to privatize education through…

"Public education is in crisis--and it has been for some time. The problem is, no one can agree on the problem, and when there is no agreement on the problem, developing solutions is nearly impossible." Thus writes Matthew T. Lambert in this study of present-day public higher education, which is currently plagued by momentous challenges.…

Introducing a new concept, skill or method to public affairs students always involves a decision about the most effective pedagogical approach that will achieve the instructor's objectives. In public affairs, education concepts are often abstract, complex and contested. One of the approaches that can be effective in introducing public affairs…

This article examines the intersection of three concepts in education -- cultural security, globalization and the postcolonial critique -- are related in order to advance the application of cultural security studies in educational administration and leadership. The first section discusses constructivist security studies as they apply to…

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…

This article describes how the Chicago schools system has been bedeviled by the social conditions faced by the city's inhabitants, and now by attempts to use privatization and school closures as the "solution" to those problems. The article describes how teachers in the Chicago Teachers' Union combined with community members to challenge…