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…

The environmental and social costs of consumer societies have increasingly been recognized. Achieving sustainable household consumption requires an understanding of the underlying roots of current consumption levels. Using the case study of menstrual care practices, different theoretical frameworks--or narratives--for understanding household…

This case study of Yanbian University, a Korean minority university in China, examines the challenges faced, strategies employed, and resources mobilized by a minority university in its attempt to become a world-class university. Specifically, this case study focuses on how the University is attempting to reach its goals within the context of the…

Tsinghua University in Beijing, a leading Chinese university, has emerged as a pioneer in the decentralisation and marketisation of adult and continuing education in China. Recent development at Tsinghua has had a significant influence on the ways in which other universities in China have approached change. The university has decentralised power…

This paper looks at the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as an important part of the international trade law system and explores if and how it affects the steering capacity of a nation state regarding higher education. It offers a new conceptual framework to look on the impact of GATS on higher education within its increasingly…

This paper explores the rising presence of transnational corporations (TNCs) in education and their mobilisation of global corporate social discourses to legitimise their private authority in education. The rising presence of TNCs is explored in the paper in two parts. First, through a taxonomy of global corporate social engagement (GCSE)…

In recent years there has been a major expansion by higher education institutions in setting up "for-profit", offshore programmes and campuses. It has been claimed that for-profit provision in a free, or unregulated market, responds to student demand and acts as a catalyst for innovation, thus fuelling arguments for a global "free…

This paper explores the potential opportunities that OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers in providing wider access to tertiary education, based on the ideal of "the right to education." It first discusses the wider implications of OCW, and its underlying philosophy, before using a case study of a tertiary preparation program (TPP) at the…

This essay reviews the history of school commercialization in the USA and the forms that it has taken over time, with particular attention paid to research measuring the scope and variety of commercialization trends in US public schools. The implications of commercialization activities such as those that promote the consumption of nutritionally…