Michigan's School Aid fund increased once more this year, but many school administrators in the state continue to hunt for effective measures to reduce spending due to increased pension costs and phased-out stimulus money. Many options available for trimming costs, such as enacting pay-to-play for sports, are extremely unpopular for districts and…

Privatization of local government services is assumed to deliver cost savings, but empirical evidence for this from around the world is mixed. We conduct a meta-regression analysis of all econometric studies examining privatization of water distribution and solid waste collection services and find no systematic support for lower costs with private…

Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic,…

Globally, Physical Education (PE) carries the stamp of neoliberalism and as a field we are keen, it seems, to accrue more of the vestiges of this ideology. While neoliberal positions and practices are not necessarily harmful to the long-term interests of the field or the students we teach, indeed it may be strategic to take them up, the field…

Instead of asking how universities can contribute to active citizenship and democratic participation (and seeking for ways to improve their contribution), this article asks what it is that universities, due to their specific mission, have to offer. After describing the transition of the historical university (and its focus on modernisation) to the…

This article focuses on the role of the state in the context of an increasing market orientation in Swedish education policy. It asks if and how a market orientation and privatisation can be reconciled with attempts to reestablish central output control. The controlling function of the state is emphasised in the form of efforts to inspect both…

This article employs Social Representations Theory as a theoretical instrument to analyse the right of children to an equitable education. It analyses how social representations of students and students' performances can be used by political actors as an interpretation system to manage contradictions in the equity education policies implemented in…

Each year, under the federal program called Supplemental Educational Services (SES), the Baltimore City Public School System (City Schools) pays educational vendors millions of public dollars to tutor thousands of its poorest students in its lowest achieving schools. Established in 2002 by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, SES was created to…

The post 9/11 environment has been characterized by domestic policy actors being incorporated into a globalizing defense industrial sector through the concept of civil-military integration. From administration to administration, the push for increased civil-military integration has spread beyond its original boundaries and has reached the…

Fuelled by forces of globalisation, China has gradually shifted from a centrally planned economy to the "socialist market economy". This study examines changes in Chinese education under globalisation and market economy, focusing on the teaching and living conditions of teachers. The study reveals that the profound transformation of…

The Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE) at Hiroshima University, through special funding by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2008, has been implementing a research project on the reform of higher education in the knowledge-based society of the 21st century. Research into the design of the future higher education system,…

For decades, for-profit educational provision has been merely tolerated, often grudgingly. In the world of charter schooling, for-profit providers are lambasted and sometimes prohibited. In higher education, for-profit institutions have grown rapidly, enrolling millions of nontraditional students and earning enmity, suspicion, and now…

The global capitalist crisis is impacting dramatically across nation states and their economies. Although a complete collapse of the system appears to have been avoided by decisions to take co-ordinated interventionist action to shore up short term demand, governments have generally rejected the more radical actions required to address the…

In the late 1990s, Fulton County Schools in Atlanta were looking at average enrollment growth of more than 2,500 students a year and a new source of significant revenue to drive its capital improvement program. With funding from Georgia's new special purpose local option sales tax, or SPLOST, for school capital needs, total revenue from the…

This study, The Privatization of Special Education, addresses a shift in the provision of special education and related services to students with disabilities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Students with disabilities are being publicly placed in private day and residential schools at public expense. In Virginia, 125 private schools are licensed…