Explores the financial and administrative autonomy granted to selected colleges in Punjab, Pakistan. Analyzes the rationale and organizational structure of the privatization scheme. Describes a pilot study of two autonomous colleges, focusing on participants' reactions to implementation problems. Autonomy is not working as intended, and negative…

Examines international origins, national intentions, and local interpretations and actions of the recent education decentralization movement in Argentina, focusing on three provinces. Discusses the international policy environment in which privatization, deregulation, and decentralization have flourished. Both material capacities and symbolic…

Whereas the shift toward pluralism, choice, deregulation, and parent empowerment reflects the market ideology's advance into education in other industrialized countries, the force driving the German movement is loss of political legitimization and the conflict-ridden state of educational policy. Past strategies for securing legitimization…

Devolution is rapidly becoming a tangled web of misunderstandings, distortions, and lies. It is time to unravel some of the complex issues, undisclosed interests, and manipulation masquerading under the devolution rubric. Most current redefinitions of schooling are probusiness and serve "big-town" interests. Schools should not reorganize…

Compares trends toward privatization and marketization of public education in socialist mainland China and capitalist Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China. Discusses policy shifts on the mainland toward decentralization, diversified educational services, and reduced government funding, and Hong Kong's efforts to promote…

In the Netherlands, the exigency of financial restraint has prompted educational expenditure cuts. Concomitant to these has been a move toward decentralization, with self-regulation at the institutional level. This paper argues that the operation of market forces and the promotion of institutional autonomy requires financial independence.…

Changes in the Australian public school principal's role have been sweeping and dislocating. Schools will move even further toward self-management under market conditions. To be effective, principals must be able to develop and carry out a cyclical process of goal-setting, need identification, priority setting, policy making, planning, budgeting,…

The Conservative Government's education reforms of the past 6 years in England and Wales, beginning with the Education Reform Act of 1988, embody a strategy designed to pursue the following 5 themes: quality, diversity, increased parental choice, and greater school autonomy and accountability. The government's rationale for reform makes no…

Discusses new Australian education policies, highlighting emerging educational forms and ways that education, markets, and new technologies are commingling in postmodern world. In commodifying the curriculum, "Captains of Educational Consciousness" and their corporate allies do not acknowledge postmodernity's downside: environmental…

Discusses globalization effects on national policy in Taiwan, focusing on how the higher education sector has transformed itself under the global tide of marketization and decentralization. Although globalization trends are clear, the nation-state is still a powerful actor in shaping national development and resolving global-national tensions.…

Ways in which the shape of New Zealand's educational system crucially affected the implementation process of market oriented educational reforms are examined in this paper. The first part discusses educational reform in New Zealand as political management. The Labour government's program from 1987 to 1990 was designed to reduce the size and scope…

This paper takes the point of view that the mechanisms of demolition are those of economic rationalism: globalization, marketization, deregulation, competition, and privatization. The growing concern of government with economies, markets, and money carries over to education and other institutions. Currently in Australia, devolution is interpreted…

In Victoria, Australia, every government school in the state is a self-managing school. The Victorian system of school-based management is called "Schools of the Future." This paper presents findings of a study that sought opinions of the school community toward various aspects of the Schools of the Future program and its outcomes. A…

Philip Woods and Carl Bagley's "School Choice and Competition" (Routledge 1998) evaluates the viability of allowing parents to choose the school their children attend within a decentralized, market environment. Despite methodological shortcomings, the authors argue effectively for schools' resistance to "competitive" social…

This paper argues that a useful way of analyzing the current moves to locate education within a decentralized framework of schools competing for educational consumers is to return to the founders of managerialism. In particular, this paper suggests that by returning to the point of production, the "mutilated rationality" (Habermas) of…