This study explores two aspects of the privatization of childhood in contemporary urban China: the emergent discourse on children's privacy and children's growing seclusion within the home. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author describes urban caregivers' engagement with the issue of children's privacy, and argues that we are now…

Studies of existing best practices cannot determine whether the current "best" schooling practices could be even better, less costly, or more effective and/or improve at a faster rate, but we can discover a cost effective menu of schooling options and each item's minimum cost through market accountability experiments. This paper describes…

Neoliberalism has brought a privatization trend that has deeply affected the structure of the educational system of countries. While public schools lag behind, new forms of private schooling have arisen creating different forms of inequality. Nonetheless, in Chile the major inequality exists between schools attended by low and middle income…

A policy sociology approach is taken to examine the connections between neo-liberalism, post-secondary provincial education (PSE) policy in Canada and the impact of those policies. Our thesis regarding the broad political economy of PSE is that over the last two decades the adoption of this ideology has been a major cause of some dramatic changes…

The impetus for this study was an article by N. Pokrovskii (2005) describing tendencies in higher education in the United States that seem promising, as they flow objectively from globalization processes and are characteristic of the whole globalizing world. As Pokrovskii is a highly qualified sociologist with a good knowledge of the system of…

Sourcing decisions for information services departments have become an integral part of every school's IT strategy. Much has been written on what areas to outsource, which partner to select, and how to negotiate contracts and service agreements. In this article, the author shares the operational lessons learned by Tulane University during the…

This paper analyzes the relationship between neoliberalism and school restructuring in Chicago. I provide an account of the ideological foundation of neoliberal education policies as well as an account of their development and implementation in the city. Additionally, I analyze Chicago's newest education agenda, Renaissance 2010. Passed into law…

Nearly ten years ago, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would outsource its facilities and real-estate operations to Trammell Crow Higher Education Services, Inc. The agreement included management of school facilities--155 buildings over 269 acres on the West Philadelphia campus. It also included construction management and…

Education management organizations, or EMOs, emerged in the early 1990s in the context of widespread interest in so-called market-based school reform proposals. Wall Street analysts coined the term EMO as an analogue to health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Proponents of EMOs claim that they bring a much needed dose of entrepreneurial spirit…

In the two years that the "Education" priority national project has been in the process of implementation, it has been found that in spite of its obviously abstract character in terms of strategy (a shortcoming that is characteristic of all four of the national projects), a flexible mechanism of state and civic administration is built…

Privatization of support services has been a method that Michigan school districts have used for several years to lower costs. More than ever before, Michigan school districts are privatizing the three main support services they offer--food, custodial and transportation. The annual survey finds that 48.8 percent of Michigan school districts are…

College and university foundations are essentially idiosyncratic, reflecting the peculiarities of individual institutional cultures, state and system contexts, and financial and political circumstances. This diversity is perhaps even greater among community colleges that tend to be more closely governed by regional and community influences. The…

Private schools were very prosperous in Shanghai during the Republican period. Shanghai Municipal Educational Bureau adopted a pattern of indirect management, especially attaching importance to normalizing and guiding the mechanism for operating a school by taking the basic measures for the registration administration. Meanwhile, appropriate…

Private extension system has been at the centre of a debate triggered by inefficient public agricultural extension. The debate is anchored on the premise that the private sector is more efficient in extension service delivery. This study evaluates the private extension system in Kenya. It employs qualitative and quantitative methods. The results…

Recent trends have shown increasing privatization of standardization activities under various corporations, trade associations, and consortia, raising significant public policy issues about how the public interest may be represented. This book establishes a framework of analysis for public policy discussion and debate. Discussing topics such as…