This study analyses attempts to renew apprenticeship over the last three decades in three liberal market economies -- US, England and Australia. We conceptualise institutional renewal as entailing both revival, or growth in apprentice starts, "and" extension, or widening its occupational base. The paper contributes to the literature by…

What does it mean to deliver left-wing policies in education nowadays? During most of the 20th century, political parties of the center-left traditionally fought for a welfare state and a comprehensive public education. However, in an era of advanced capitalism, these same parties have tended to advocate and even deepen neoliberal and new public…

Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I…

The development of the higher education system in China has experienced huge changes alongside the transitions in the socio-economic milieu since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Among the major structural transformations of higher education, the reform during the 1950s and the one from 1998 to 2009 can be seen as two…

This article examines charter school reform in the midst of gentrifying urban spaces and documents, through extant research and the findings from our research, the role of school choice in perpetuating school segregation in racially diverse neighborhoods. We argue that 65 years after "Brown v. Board of Education," the more the specific…

National higher education systems have undergone a series of transformations in recent decades. Since the 1980s, regulatory systems governing higher education have witnessed a number of changes. In particular, there has been a shift away from a model of state control, to one of state oversight, in which the state designs a framework of rules and…

The United Kingdom's 2010 Academies Act further widened the school and State relationship with free schools, in particular, becoming a model separately identified as endorsing and celebrating the neoliberal ideology of competition informed by market principles. The main features of the model are described and complemented with illustrative…

Today's education reform movement is funded heavily by a network of wealthy elite that often prize neoliberal and free-market interests. Within this network, Teach for America (TFA) is at the nexus of overlapping interests in an educational marketplace where corporate values become the norm for defining both progress and success. Students labeled…

The author argues that the ascendance of individualistic, free market-oriented ideas about the education of Black people is best understood as the product of the decline of collective social movements. The careers of two of the most well-known American Black educators illustrate this pattern. Booker T. Washington and Geoffrey Canada rose to…

Contemporary Conservative education policy may seem to be hastily formulated and executed, but, it is arguably founded on deeply held ideological beliefs. By briefly examining the history of the British Conservative party and its complex formation and disparate ideological traditions, including the broader conservative diaspora, four key…

In 1955, Milton Friedman authored a foundational paper proposing a shift in funding and governance mechanisms for public K-12 schools, suggesting that parents be awarded tuition vouchers that they could use to pay for private sector education services for their children, rather than relying on government provided neighborhood schools. Friedman…

Changes in tertiary education policy in Aotearoa New Zealand in the last decade have impacted on adult and community education (ACE). Marginalized and understood as non-formal education at the turn of the century, ACE is now part of the "tertiary landscape". It is explicitly steered by education policy, its role severely narrowed, its…

In response to the subjection of universities in Britain and elsewhere to 'free market' ideology and the resulting narrow concern with claimed economic effects and benefits, this essay explores some of the processes of persuasion and justification as they are employed in debate and in resistance to this damaging orthodoxy. First, the short-term…

The growing popularity of the corporate university model raises the question of whether the market principles are suitable for planning the policy of a key enterprise like the university without weakening its capacity of pursuing critical knowledge and teaching for democracy. Does the inclusion of the free market imperatives in the functioning of…

With contributions from Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, Pasi Sahlberg, and Martin Carnoy, "Global Education Reform" is an eye-opening analysis of national educational reforms and the types of high-achieving systems needed to serve all students equitably.The collection documents the ideologically and educationally distinctive…