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…

While it is misleading to discuss the neoliberal university as a fundamentally new incarnation of higher education in the United States, meaningful changes have occurred over the past forty years that have aligned the university with neoliberal ideology resulting in important differences between the neoliberal university and its predecessors.…

For-profit schools such as Whittle Communications' Edison Project are a growing force that cannot be ignored. A balance must be struck between public and private, avoiding the polarized view of public education as inefficient bureaucracy or private education as valuing profits more than people. (SK)

This article discusses how representations of individual discipline and risk-taking in mass media inform the broader public discourses about public education and the public sector generally. Such representations and narratives about individual discipline and risk-taking often function in mass media as moral imperatives of consumer culture. Such…

Countries with good education systems have good health and transportation systems and equitable access to health care and public services. One must look at education in terms of inputs, not production or outputs. When healthy, well-fed, well-housed children enter an education system that provides transportation and access to books, dictionaries,…

Since the early 1980s, neoliberalism has become the hegemonic ideology and has expedited the globalization of economies and the emergence of the market as the central organizing principle of social relations and collective life. Surveys the impact of these structural and ideological changes on politics (including democratization), economies, and…

This book describes how and why educational choice movements will affect public education. It uses a public-choice approach to argue that both the supporters and opponents of private and school choice have failed to address several critical issues. Following an introductory chapter, chapter 2 is devoted to the rationale for contracting out…

With reference to Karl Marx's writings on education, this article outlines the education of the future as anti-capitalist education. In starting out from a conception of communism as the "real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (Marx), it is argued that the anti-capitalist education of the future consists of three…

Trends fostered by globalization have increased pressures for school choice in westernized nations. A review of international research indicates that policies that increase school choice can balance the tensions inherent in simultaneously educating for diversity and social cohesion, but only if carefully designed and monitored. Civil society must…

The World Bank helps countries to arrive at whatever combination of public and private control is best for their particular economic circumstances. This booklet describes that work and summarizes examples of private-sector involvement in health and education provision in the developing world today. The examples also illustrate what the World Bank…

The private provision trend in technical and vocational education (TVE) in sub-Saharan Africa occurred as the deterioration of state-run TVE systems in the region created a market niche for private providers. While advocates of deregulation believe the adoption of market principles in TVE will lead to greater efficiency and effectiveness, private…