Describes a study to determine the extent of present and projected future levels of school counseling privatization and to determine if differences in privatization exist in reference to school district enrollment size. Of 300 Washington school districts surveyed, 20% contracted to outside counseling providers. Privatization was significantly more…

Privatization pioneer Education Alternatives Inc. (EAI) has lost contracts to manage schools in Baltimore, Maryland, and Hartford, Connecticut. EAI's backers claim the lost contracts are proof of an entrenched bureaucracy. Others fault the contracts for lack of specificity about roles, responsibilities, payments, and outcomes. (MLF)

Summarizes the main points of this special issue on outsourcing in higher education by drawing together and relating conclusions, and speculating on the future of external partnerships. Also identifies some external partnerships and their specific nature. (GCP)

Changes in Russian education are described: one-third of children are being educated at home; state universities face dwindling financial support; private institutions are being established; freedom of curriculum design has replaced uniform pedagogical processes; and new forms of higher education are emerging. (SK)

Our review of Henry Giroux's Stealing Innocence, Alex Molnar's Giving Kids the Business, and Kenneth Saltman's Collateral Damage describes how these authors assess the problems posed by contemporary corporate influences on public schools and considers the solutions they offer to counter those influences. We also examine Henry Levin's edited…

Supplemental Educational Services, mandated by NCLB as an option for students in low-performing Title I schools, has just completed its fourth implementation year, and a number of solid research reports on the Federal program are now available. This commentary reviews the political background to the out-of-school tutoring program, the for-profit…

Western governments appear increasingly dissatisfied with the rising costs and apparent static performance of their education systems. This dissatisfaction has been manifested in a critical re-examination of the near-monopoly of publicly provided schooling. Elsewhere in the public sector, privatization and competitive tendering have been…

This article reads the educational implications of "intellectual property" that are found in the double meaning of "property", as the word refers to an economic right and a quality of being. It briefly visits the seventeenth-century origins of this double concept of intellectual property (IP), with particular attention paid to…

In this article, the authors detail the conditions and patterns of academic capitalism and the new economy in US higher education. Subsequently, a conceptual model is offered for considering the international reach and national and local patterns of academic capitalism. Further, a distinctive Mexican case of entrepreneurialism is offered. The…

Public higher education has undergone a process similar to that in the national polity: a one-sided struggle by those with power to shape the institution to be more market driven, more focused on what will generate (non-state) revenues, more dominated by top administrators, and less concerned about the working class and people of color. This…

This article analyzes Chicago's new Renaissance 2010 school plan to close public schools and reopen them as choice and charter schools. Grounding the analysis in participatory research methods, the authors argue that Chicago's education accountability policies have laid the groundwork for privatization. They furthermore argue that Renaissance 2010…

As public schools in countries like the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand continue to suffer from the damaging effects of poorly conceptualized educational reforms, educators struggle to come up with alternatives with which to reclaim schools. While acknowledging the situational, contextual and temporal differences between these…

The authors of the articles in this issue have provided a descriptive, analytic view of the politics of privatization, not a normative one. They have elected to view privatization more as a basic tool of government, with both uses and limitations, than strictly as an issue of ideology. Through their examination of the nexus between privatization…

Supporters of public education fear attempts to privatize schools, while the private sector has always struggled against the monopolistic power of the public schools that educates almost 90% of all K-12 students. This trepidation has recently been intensified by the creation of a "third sector" that includes charter schools, voucher…

This article is a compilation of the views of 16 PhD students and the author on Steven Klees' 2007 article titled, "A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: Misleading analyses and failed policies." The students and the author have taken Klees' article as a stimulus to try and explicate the anatomy of the decline of the…