Higher education marketization has often been explained either by state weakness or by the articulation capacity of business actors. However, these perspectives overlook the role of other actors in the negotiation processes determining the results of these reforms. Like other countries of the Global South, Peru experienced a radical marketization…

The World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) purports to benchmark developing country education systems against global best practices. SABER covers 13 topics, called "domains," and has produced over 16,000 indicators of what the Bank considers best practice and applied them in over 130 countries. Yet this…

This article examines "government-registered medersas" in Mali and suggests that their appeal and expansion are due to their unique and innovative integration of Western and Islamic educational epistemologies (not simply subjects). Registered medersas respond to parental demands for the early introduction of "secular"…

This article takes a critical comparative approach to examining autonomous schooling in the United States and Australia. Amid the market imperatives currently driving education priorities, its focus is on how autonomy can be mobilized in ways that preserve the integrity of public education. Through reference to key debates and research about…

Describes recent structural, curricular, and ideological changes in Czechoslovakian schools: closure of many business-operated vocational schools, declining vocational enrollment, localization of educational decision making, emergence of private and religious schools, church-state conflicts over ownership of school buildings, emphasis on…

This Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) study was conducted in two phases. Phase I describes selected aspects of primary school finance arrangements in ten countries; Phase II examines the relationship between financial instruments and selected educational policy. Strengths and weaknesses of each system are assessed. (Author/KC)

During the 1980s, the higher education systems of China and Taiwan were reformed as part of selective social transformations driven by different domestic forces: economic in China and political in Taiwan. Common to both reforms was devolution of institutional powers to colleges and universities, but within institutional and curricular limits…

In 1983, Spain's Socialist government enacted the Law for University Reform (LRU), which decentralized university administration and strengthened institutional autonomy as a means of encouraging reform and greater accountability to social needs. Discusses the legacy of the Franco regime, LRU provisions for university organization and governance,…

Examination of recent reforms at three Mexican public universities suggests that university administrators have had little will or power to regulate expansion in the face of growing social demand for higher education. Discusses "populist" and "modernist" conceptions of university reform, which focus on social needs and economic…

The academic profession in Hong Kong wrestles with preserving academic freedom and institutional autonomy during retrocession to Chinese sovereignty, while also dealing with issues related to rapid expansion and increasing student diversity, increased pressure to improve standards of research and teaching, and devolution of responsibility for…

China's private schools, colleges, and technical institutes overwhelmingly are autonomous entrepreneurial institutions that respond to unmet educational demands by selling marketable skills for a profit. Although comprising less than 4% of the country's schools, they demonstrate the market's growing strength in China's socialist society: adoption…

Previous studies of the role of education in state-building have neglected the relative autonomy and non-neutral stance of the school system. Bernstein's notion of "pedagogic device" is used to illuminate conflicts and contradictions between educational development and state-building in the case of Singapore's efforts to control the…