External and standardized assessments based on student results are a contested education policy among school actors. Movements of opposition have emerged in different countries, especially in those contexts with high-stakes accountability systems. However, this phenomenon has not been analyzed in soft accountability systems. The objective of this…

The UK education system is becoming increasingly dominated by exclusive economic and political ideology. The neoliberal agenda marketises young people and encourages them to take part in a competitive system. The rise of multi-academy trusts (MATs) further exacerbates an already inequitable system in which young people with special education needs…

Universal voucher policies allow any student, regardless of their family income level or history of attending public schools, to be eligible to use public funding to attend private, often religious, schools or home schooling. From 2021 to 2025, the number of statewide universal voucher programs has gone from zero to thirteen. These efforts have…

Monitoring is an important component of state general supervision systems and typically encompasses various types of activities at different levels of intensity. States must monitor all local education agencies (LEAs) at least once every 6 years. Some states are grappling with the best way to meet this expectation in light of a large number of…

This paper focuses on an area of privatisation that has not to date received significant attention in educational research: the privatisation of infrastructure, facilities and maintenance, and in particular the labour of cleaning. Analysing the case of Victoria, Australia, we demonstrate how successive governments have defended the privatisation…

The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targeted policy has been subsumed by a broader umbrella or meta-policy of inclusion, whilst at the same…

States founded, control, and fund public postsecondary institutions because higher education helps meet state goals. Public institutions of higher education provide considerable public benefits to states, but these benefits have not been systematically measured. As a result, public conversations about the broad value proposition of higher…

Privatization of education has expanded dramatically worldwide in the last two decades, and Turkey is no exception. It is seen that the developments affecting the transformation of public services began with the implementation of neoliberal education policies, especially after the 1980s. These policies have led to a significant transformation in…

How does platformization work as vehicle for the integration of public online education into a private global digital infrastructure? And how can education technologies ('edtech') be governed at various levels to benefit the public good? In this article, we examine online environments in primary schools in The Netherlands, a traditionally strong…

Education markets have spread worldwide over the past few decades. Frequently, the expansion of markets in education is presented by their promoters as a means to improve the opportunities of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged students. However, the evidence available shows that market-oriented policies that enhance competition and choice…

This article examines the ways in which teachers and community-based activists collaborated to advance an anti-privatisation agenda within an urban school district. The article emerges from our respective studies of privatisation in Oakland, one a historical study of the advance of neoliberalism and the other a case study (Merriam 2007,…

Privatization of education has become a prevalent global trend, representing a significant shift from viewing education as a public good to considering it as a private commodity. This transformation is closely tied to the modernization of the state under the principles of neoliberalism. A comprehensive analysis, as presented in this book using…

White-label programs in higher education, designed and supported by online program management (OPM) firms, pose unique challenges to current policy. In part this is because OPM firms and services are either exempt from policy or fall into a gray area that policy has not yet considered. Policymakers, however, do not need to develop entirely new…

In "Rules for a Flat World", Hadfield argues that although the world is becoming increasingly connected and faster paced due to leaps in technological innovation, the prevailing legal systems -- established by governments and run almost exclusively by lawyers -- have not kept pace. They are increasingly proving ill suited for and…

Symbolic of the rise of neoliberal principles in Irish education policy, there is now a move towards advancing school autonomy and decentralizing decision-making to individual schools, possibly emulating the academy model that has become widespread in England. Increasing the freedom and independence of schools may involve using private actors to…