The neoliberal turn has driven attempts to marketize education, but how does marketization occur? In this article I draw on ethnographic and linguistic-ethnographic methods to investigate marketization through a microanalytic lens. My investigation focuses on a team of educational professionals, who participated in a workshop led by an…

In this article the way in which current neo-fascism is penetrating education is analysed. For this purpose, a case study sample of three prominent figures was chosen linked to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an organisation that has woven global networks and managed to have an important political presence worldwide: Steve…

School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school 'autonomy' has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are…

This article addresses the question: how do a new cadre of teacher education providers in England, imbued in the discourses of the Global Education Reform Movement, construct the problem of a supposedly "failing" existing teacher education system associated with universities; what solutions to this problem do they propose and on what…

This multimodal critical discourse analysis is part of a larger equity audit of how the websites of 11 of the largest U.S. school districts discussed access to dual language bilingual education (DLBE). Prior research has frequently documented how administrators utilize DLBE programs to compete with one another for the supposedly necessary resource…

A provision of India's Right to Education Act requires private schools to enrol 25% of children from 'disadvantaged' and 'economically weaker' backgrounds. Described as a unique public-private partnership, this policy has been widely debated for its promotion of private actors in ensuring equity and access to education. Within this controversial…

Education within capitalism too often reproduces social and economic inequalities. Schools are depicted as failing and teachers are blamed. In this paper, I examine the discourses underlying this situation and the role of foundations in the US and the World Bank in developing countries in maintaining it. I look at the neoliberal remedy of…

Scholars of political economy have raised the question of whether recent populist movements around the world signal the decline of neoliberal hegemony. What would such a decline mean for education policy, an arena that has been dominated by a neoliberal common sense for several decades? This study investigates the policy discourse of former U.S.…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) created the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a political actor in global education through a logic of governance by numbers (Grek, 2009). This article discusses how PISA has became a major showcase for the OECD as an assessment tool par excellence while also…

This study analyses the "de facto" emerging intra-school competition between the Israeli Ministry of Education (MOE) and external organisations at public Israeli secondary schools by exploring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programmes. Given on-going privatisation processes within the education system, the…

Fundraising and collecting fees are ubiquitous in Ontario, Canada's public schools. Critics assert that these practices perpetuate and exacerbate inequities between schools and communities. In this article we present findings from a critical policy analysis of an advocacy group's efforts to change Ontario's fees and fundraising policies over the…

Over the last 40 years, American institutions of higher education have been encouraged to align with the private sector by policymakers, think tank experts and businessmen in order to become more efficient and more accountable. In a wider sense, this new partnership may be evidence of what has been termed "disaster capitalism." In…

As pathologizing, racialized, and patriarchal rhetoric undergirds neoliberal education reform, deficit narratives characterize the education of Black youth. Such narratives present deep challenges for educational policy and community-based educational spaces. This article explores the ways in which community-based educators resist narratives of…

Corporate school reform is a global movement that is gaining a growing momentum. Central to this reform agenda is "personalized learning," presented by its advocates as a better alternative to the traditional model of schooling. In spite of its appealing possibilities for education and society, scholars in countries such as the United…

There has been a growing concentration of high-achieving students attending selective public schools of choice as part of the neoliberal reforms of education. While this growth has had an eroding effect on the aim of inclusivity in public education, few have explored this development as a new segment of elite schooling. This paper fills this gap…