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In October 2022, New Brunswick Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development Dominic Cardy publicly resigned and widely disclosed his disappointment with Premier Blaine Higgs' leadership. Using Cardy's unprecedented public resignation letter as a primary source, this paper explores the inner workings of neoliberal governance and privatization in public education and critically analyzes data manipulation, governance shifts, and problematic conservative "hands-offism." Applying a rhizomatic methodological framing and theoretically drawing from Bourdieu and Passeron's (1977) conceptualization of symbolic violence and Gilmore's (2008) notion of "organized abandonment," we argue that neoliberal governance and privatization disproportionately affect vulnerable communities and weaken democratic processes. To understand these complexities, we utilize a rhizomatic analysis, simultaneously considering historical and geographical contexts, governance structures, and political narratives. We conclude that neoliberal governance and privatization are inherently symbolically violent, as they are used in tandem to perpetually defund and dismantle public institutions.

Across Canada, school districts have been confronting a backlash to their equity and social justice initiatives. Critics of public education have been arguing that the solution to these controversies is to increase school choice. Using several examples from the United States, this paper argues that the endgame of these strategies is to undermine the legitimacy of public education and increase support for private alternatives. To protect its future viability, the paper also calls on public education advocates to grapple with ongoing marginalization within school systems which make private options increasingly attractive.

For decades, there has been a well-coordinated effort to unmake public education in Canada and around the globe. Neoliberal reformers have undermined public education through increased privatization, marketization, and managerialism. Government austerity measures have shaped policy that falsely necessitates, validates, and legitimizes the privatization of public education. All of these forces that fuel the neoliberal reform movement diminish the collective aims, benefits, and responsibility of/for public education. Instead, the movement encourages systems that ration education. The moves to emulate business models in education systems exacerbate inequities and run counter to the purpose of public education. Indeed, attempts to marketize, commodify, privatize, and dismantle public education are well-organized and coordinated. Yet, in Canada, provincial and territorial fragmentation has veiled the well-organized rhetoric and tactics of neoliberal education reforms. As a result, community and political responses have often been confined within borders. The reformers have been centrally organized, but the resistance has not. Recognizing that provincial and territorial borders can act as barriers to collective advocacy, this special issue is intended to share activities, research, and writing from across Canada about the tactics and impacts of privatization, to recognize the efforts being made to organize a collective response to privatization efforts, and to encourage national conversations beyond borders.

In 2021, the government of Manitoba made their plans to reform public education overt with Bill 64. Although the legislation was withdrawn as a result of immense opposition from critically engaged Manitobans, the government did not abandon its neoliberal reform plans. Instead, the spectre of Bill 64 now lingers through a variety of new educational initiatives. In response, People for Public Education is working to keep the fight against the privatization of public education alive. Through consciousness raising and by constructing hopeful and imaginative visions of the future, this nascent community advocacy group strives to protect public education from the deleterious effects of neoliberalism. In this article, I reflexively interrogate and critically analyze the emergence, evolving objectives, values, and actions of People for Public Education for the purpose of inspiring future resistance against neoliberal education reforms.

The New Education Policy (NEP), 2020, adopted by Government of India, envisages significant and far-reaching reforms in higher education sector in India. In this article, I foreground certain peculiar features of the process of massification of higher education in India, including privatisation and fragmentation. I locate the political economy of higher education in India in tensions inherent in centre-state relations and the pressure to respond to popular aspirations on the one hand and maintain standards on the other. The NEP, 2020 does not appear to acknowledge these historical processes. Instead, they appear to rely on a corporate model of BoG-driven governance of higher education institutions to drive the envisaged changes.

A recent global reconnaissance of Christian higher education found a number of key themes that shaped current developments, such as the pressing challenges of secularization and nationalization but also the advantages of privatization and massification. This article provides an update to this older analysis by taking a birds-eye view of trends within the past 70 years of global Christian higher education. It reveals that privatization and massification trends do not predict new developments in countries and outliers always exist. Furthermore, it highlights some findings missed in previous analyses related to the importance of indigenous Christian groups and Christian general education.

Federal and highly decentralized political systems open different spaces to interpret, adapt, and enact international policy trends and ideas within the same territory. Spain, a country with a highly decentralized educational system and contentious territorial politics, is a very suitable case to analyze these dynamics. Spain and its different regions have not been immune to the influence of global policy ideas that gear around promoting private provision, school choice, and New Public Management (NPM) in education. However, the consolidation of the decentralization project, together with the fact that many regional governments have aimed to construct, for a variety of reasons, singular political profiles, have resulted in markedly different policy trajectories. To show this, this article pays particular attention to recent changes in the educational governance arrangements of two important Spanish regions, Madrid and Catalonia, as they have gone through differentiated processes of educational reform. Albeit the two regional education systems share important features (such as a historical and wide-scale public-private partnership for school provision), they have engaged with, combined, and mobilized exogenous and endogenous privatization policy ideas in remarkably different ways. The article delves into the political drivers behind this policy differentiation process by paying special attention to the relations of coordination, conflict, and competition that prevail within an incomplete federal system, such as the Spanish one.

The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization personnel, we sought to understand how Obama officials envisioned and changed the role of the federal government in fostering K-12 race-conscious educational policies and what mechanisms they used to advance priorities. We also explored changes Trump administration officials made to federal civil rights policies and through which institutional means. Our findings reveal through-lines between past and present political agendas and the methods for enactment. Obama's interagency efforts to reinvigorate civil rights oversight and enforcement in education harkened back to the mid-1960s era of bipartisan cooperation around school desegregation. Yet the decades-long legal and policy retrenchment against civil rights advances made in the 1960s constrained further progress. Trump's administration advocated for the privatization of public education through increased choice and opposed race-consciousness in education law and policy. The reshaping of the federal judiciary under Trump presents challenges for race-consciousness in the law for years to come. Recognizing these consistent through-lines and constraints will be essential for advocates and policymakers going forward.

Purpose: New philanthropy develops new forms of policy "problem-solving" through the influx of private actors' money and ideas. It adopts singular configurations across different policy spaces, with implications for education governance. We address this phenomenon by analyzing the Varkey Foundation's (VF) "landing" and "expansion" in Latin America. VF is a global philanthropic organization registered in the United Kingdom in 2011 with a main hub in Argentina, where it landed in 2017. Design/Approach/Methods: We use network ethnography to examine the influence of new philanthropy on education governance as this phenomenon demands new methods to grasp the "realities" of governing beyond conventional ways and understanding policy mobilities. Findings: Results indicate how VF "landed" in a little pro-market space via productive uses of policy networks. The second phase of data collection and analysis presents further consolidation of VF in Argentina, its expansion into Latin America, and its establishment as a legitimate education policy actor. Originality/Value: This study provides new evidence and insights into how policy networks enable new philanthropy to land and consolidate within national boundaries and, later, across the region as a legitimate actor in education.

Globalization of education is widely contested in the current academic discussion due to its polarizing effects on the economy, society, and culture. Globalization and colonization have several commonalities because the origin of globalization can be traced to the colonial era. The privatization of education has also emerged with globalization. Applying a post-colonial critique and analysis, this paper will discuss how globalization is a colonial legacy that transforms Western educational policies in developing countries like Pakistan and how it creates Westernization, supremacy, and marginalization of teachers and students (Spring, 2008). Pakistan was formerly the colonized region of united India under Great Britain's empire. Globalization in education policies are rapidly changing the current educational landscape in several countries including Pakistan. The advancement of global forces enhanced standardization and privatization in the education system of Pakistan which has increased educational inequity along with the loss of indigenous language and culture. The post-colonial and indigenous scholarship in education will offer better frameworks of equitable access to quality education for all.

We examine private supplementary tutoring within the context of Finnish general upper secondary education. Specifically, we focus on profit-driven private preparatory course providers who cater to individual students and their families, aiming to improve applicants' prospects of gaining access to higher education. We examine this during a time when a recent education policy reform has renewed seeking admission to higher education in Finland, consequently impacting the private supplementary tutoring market associated with it. We draw on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus as a starting point for discussing the complex dynamics between public and private actors in the field of Finnish general upper secondary education and the role of economic capital. The ethnographic data analyzed for this paper consist of field notes and interviews (n = 58) from three general upper secondary schools, produced in 2019-2020. The study aims to investigate the negotiations between the public and private spheres of education within the everyday practices of Finnish public upper secondary education during an educational policy reform. We conclude that the fields of public and private education are not separate but rather intertwined, and they can become blurred in the everyday life of schools through both temporal and spatial overlaps.

The time is ripe to reexamine the social contract between higher education and society. Historically, the social contract has promised an advancement of the public good through applied knowledge production and thoughtful research dissemination, training citizens to lead and actively participate in democracy, and supporting local and global communities, just to name a few. However, institutions have slowly but surely diverted off this path over the last 40 years, in large part due to systemic shifts toward neoliberalism and, with it, the privatization, commercialization, and marketization of perceived public goods. In this article, the authors call for engagement in developing a new social contract between higher education and society. This article offers three important, albeit not exhaustive, pauses for leaders to engage in that can help collectively shift toward a better social contract. These pauses consider numerous critiques and pain points to offer up a new vision for a social contract for higher education. Hopefully leaders, including scholars, administrators, practitioners, and policy makers, will implement these pauses as they work collaboratively with students, local communities, professional associations, and national organizations in pursuit of a new social contract between higher education and society.

This article offers new empirical evidence regarding the limits of the premises of educational privatisation policies. Educational markets rely on the assumption that private participation has the potential to boost school diversification and open new educational opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Using a fresh empirical approach, we draw on the Chilean case to investigate this rationale, which remains a controversial issue in the global educational discussion regarding privatisation. We examine the assumption of diversification by analysing three aspects: the attributes used by private subsidised schools to position themselves in the educational market ('Value Proposition'), the extent to which they embody these stated attributes and the alignment between them and parental preferences. Based on surveys and administrative records, our findings suggest that although schools display clear identities to position themselves in the educational market, there is also a mismatch between what some types of schools offer and what families receive. Our data also reveal a high level of social stratification between school types which cannot only be explained based on parental preferences or school admissions. We interpret the unfulfilled promise of diversification as a failure in the privatisation process. Based on these findings, we discuss the policy-related factors of incoherent and unequal diversification in the Chilean educational system.

Finland has traditionally had a universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) system like the other Nordic countries, but in the last 15 years this system has undergone considerable marketisation and privatisation suggested to enable parental choice of ECEC. Much of the existing research on parental ECEC decisions has been conducted in contexts where ECEC systems differ considerably from the welfare and educational regimes of the Nordic countries. Moreover, parents' views of private ECEC have scarcely been studied in the context of universal service provision. This study examined the frames the parents of a four-year-old child use to justify the selection of a private ECEC centre for their child. The data comprised qualitative interviews with eight Finnish parents. By applying discourse analytic tools, four frames were differentiated: accessibility, pedagogy, ECEC facilities and security. The findings demonstrated that while the accessibility of the services in terms of location and opening hours was the basis on which "choice" of ECEC was possible, the parents acted as active agents in the ECEC markets looking for services that would correspond to their values and perceptions of good childhood. The study raises the question of how well public policies and services can meet parents' expectations and adjust to increasingly prevalent ideals of individualisation in society.

National policies aiming at marketisation and privatisation in welfare sectors such as Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) require governance and organisation to be realised. In Sweden, the municipalities are key but largely under-researched organisers for preschool quasi-market infrastructures. This study explores the different ways in which Swedish municipalities act as quasi-market organisers in the preschool setting. Following organisational theory, we analyse their market shaping activities in translating national regulations in efforts to influence, support and control their local preschool quasi-market. Documents, websites, and interviews with public officials from 30 municipalities characterised as having either a large (N = 10), medium (N = 10), or small (N = 10) private ECEC sector are analysed. The analysis highlights large variations on how municipalities act as market makers, which is further discussed in the form of three ideal types: the "Frontier", the "Keeper", and the "Endorser." We conclude that municipalities' varying and hybridised market shaping activities and local characteristics are important to understand the implications that emerge in terms of different rules of the game, stakeholder interdependencies and relationships, composition of market actors etc. Attentiveness to the sub-national/local actors are essential in understanding different welfare quasi-markets within national policy frameworks of marketisation and privatisation.

Drawing upon a long-term study of venture philanthropy and public schools in Australia, this paper focuses on Teach For Australia (TFA) as a major component of a venture philanthropic network, one that builds critical infrastructures and connections between non-government organisations and the state, creating a product pipeline into public schools. Utilising interviews with staff from Teach For Australia and venture philanthropic organisations, comprehensive and rigorous financial data, reviews, reports and website data, the analysis aims to identify the major philanthropic funders, individual actors and private foundations that leverage Teach For Australia, illustrating how this network develops for-profit pathways into public schools. In pushing a deficit framing of public schools, these networks incur privatisation effects, including flows of money, resources and key decision-making. They compromise the democratic principles upon which public schools are ideally based, in that the most disadvantaged public schools are opened up to 'entrepreneurial' and risk-taking corporate behaviour to test out teachers, products and services. By examining streams of revenue, partnerships and networks, we show how the purportedly non-profit Teach For Australia develops for-profit opportunities and business partnerships nested in corporate philanthropy, resulting in a privatisation effect on public schools.

Those working toward equitable K-12 computing education in the United States have always had their work cut out for them: understanding how best to teach, developing robust curricula, designing novel tools, building teacher capacity, and supporting systemic change in schools to bring equitable computing education to young people. Collectively, these areas represent an ambitious and complex set of problems to solve. But current changes to the educational landscape in the United States--where teaching basic ideas about how to critically engage with the world has become deeply politicized, and where forces working toward privatization of education are on the rise--require us to broaden the scope of our work. Our efforts must shift to not just include the aforementioned problems but also include ones that are more explicitly political: engaging in solidarity with the larger project of public education and supporting teachers to have the freedom to teach what students will need to contribute to our society.

The neoliberal turn has driven attempts to marketize education, but how does marketization occur? In this article I draw on ethnographic and linguistic-ethnographic methods to investigate marketization through a microanalytic lens. My investigation focuses on a team of educational professionals, who participated in a workshop led by an organizational consultant named Eric. During the workshop, Eric successfully encouraged the educators to adopt some key business terms that he imported from the high-tech sector. My findings indicate that the marketization of education was not straightforward. Rather, the process encountered some resistance and sowed confusion before a business discourse ultimately took hold. The process of marketization became entangled with the power dynamics shaped by group members' positioning vis-à-vis one another; and furthermore, it required the group to negotiate the meaning of some key terms. Marketization was ultimately mediated by a cognitive device called the Business Model Canvas and it relied on some pre-existing neoliberal tendencies among the workshop's participants.

Controversy is intensifying with the rapid spread of charter schools and their domination of the education reform agenda. As charter enrolment increases in the USA, inequities in education worsen. This article contributes to the debate on contemporary education policy by critically examining charter issues from the US literature and stakeholder data. We add insights to research on charter controversy from public discourse and stakeholder groups. Our narrative animates pros and cons in the charter debate through stakeholders' eyes, in effect contributing voices from the field. A case study of a public charter school in Virginia provides a revealing prism for understanding charter schools. Content analysis was performed on data from nine interviews held during the pandemic with founding members (parents, etc.). As found, the charter narrative of success and struggle around public perception, racial equity, segregation, funding, approval, effectiveness, and accreditation was a school story. Charter policy effects on social groups--parents, teachers, community members, and leaders--in their association with the charter's evolution were identifiable. The conflicting views resonate with polarising tensions nationwide. Regarding international implications of the analysis, the move to privatise and reform public education through independent schools with autonomy continues to impact European countries.

From climate disaster to the specter of nuclear annihilation to the rise of fascism and destruction of democracy to the advent of AI and other potentially destructive technologies, a number of material threats are matched by symbolic threats that undermine the capacities of people to respond. The war on public and critical education and the public sphere, the erosion of investigative journalism, ideologies of cynicism, and the crises of critical theoretical tools and literacies undermine individual and collective agency to respond to these threats. The result of these material threats and crises of agency is political paralysis, cynicism, and despair. This article focuses on three material and symbolic disasters: (1) climate crisis and natural disaster; (2) the privatization of public education in continuing and new digital forms as part of the broader rightist war on the public; and (3) the rise of authoritarian anti-democratic movements. The threats posed by these phenomena are bolstered by ideologies in education that are profoundly deterministic, fatalistic, and anti-agentic. The first section briefly details these intertwined threats and the ideologies about them. The second section makes the case for modes of education and pedagogy that inform the understanding and agency of teachers, citizens, and other meaning making actors to challenge these threats and pursue public and democratic values and build institutions of care and security.

As the privatisation of the public sector has grown rapidly in Sweden in the last decade, private companies have become an imperative part of education. Private companies sell and deliver consultancy, hardware, software, services, etc. to schools and municipalities. This study examines a growing rate of activities from companies and businesses working within public sectors. It also examines consequences of cooperation between private and public actors. Findings show that multiple actors meet in different forms and with different functions, in multiple ways and with diverse agendas. What can be discerned is strong Public-Private Partnerships (PPP), where actors and networks are linked together, directly or indirectly, in fluid and flexible relations and partnerships. Private actors on educational markets not only becomes edupreneurs but policyneurs, a new concept introduced. As private actors engage in the policy making and the public sphere, a complex and disorganised landscape with new formations of strong actors emerge, entailing a number of consequences. One implication is the establishment of lobbyism in the Swedish educational landscape, with potentially negative consequences for democracy. One conclusion is that new formations of power dissolve the roles and functions of private and public actors within education, with implications on decision-making, transparency, and democracy.

External and standardized assessments based on student results are a contested education policy among school actors. Movements of opposition have emerged in different countries, especially in those contexts with high-stakes accountability systems. However, this phenomenon has not been analyzed in soft accountability systems. The objective of this article is to study the opt-out movement in Catalonia, understood as an anti-standardization movement in a system of soft accountability. In order to do so, we adopt the case study approach as a methodological strategy, based on the triangulation of semi-structured interviews with activists (n = 14), key stakeholders (n = 3), and document and press analysis (n = 25). The results shed light on the emergence and nature of the movement, its opportunity structures, the discursive frames and the repertoires of collective action. Our results show how accountability instruments have a 'life of their own' beyond their policy design. In this sense, the opt-out movement in Catalonia identifies potential risks and adverse effects similar to those reported in high-stakes systems, developing a repertoire of collective action and discursive frames similar to other emerging anti-standardization movements in high-stakes contexts.

The trend towards privatization of higher education has been a dominant feature in India, particularly during the decade 2010-20. The main research question enquired in the current research is regarding the evolution of privatization in India during the period 2010 to 2020 and its consequences for access to higher education in India. The methodology used in the paper is descriptive analysis, based on secondary data. It was observed that, while the absolute expenditure of the government on higher education has amplified, the expenditure as a percentage of GDP has reduced during 2010-20. The proportionate share of private institutes and enrolments has increased consistently and rapidly, and that of the public sector has either stagnated or reduced.

Between 2003 and 2016, the percentage of undergraduates taking at least one course online nearly tripled, increasing from 15.6 to 43.1. Initially, that enrollment was concentrated in the proprietary, or for-profit, higher education sector. In response, and to make up for declining numbers of "traditional" college students and the resulting revenue shortfalls, some public colleges and universities formed arrangements with for-profit education companies. Private education companies, often referred to as online program managers (OPMs), manage hundreds of online degree programs for public colleges and universities, though the public--including the students and faculty in the programs--is too often unaware. Public-private partnerships can be found up and down the education sector and throughout the typical campus, where they are relied on for housing, dining, maintenance, and parking services. In reality, such partnership billing is meant to sugarcoat what is really happening: outsourcing. In many respects, colleges and universities in these arrangements have outsourced their core functions and shifted control of a public good into the hands of private, for-profit companies.

We look at the expansion of a higher education system through the lens of concentration in the distribution of enrollments among institutions. Using data from the Brazilian Higher Education Censuses from 2002 to 2016, we found that the diversification of segments that compose the system was associated with an increase in concentration and market oligopolization. The higher education expansion in Brazil has a history of high growth and high concentration among large institutions. Enrollment more than doubled in 14 years, but growth among the top 1% of institutions was higher than the total growth among the bottom 90% of institutions. Much of the market concentration was due to a combination of subsidized privatization and deregulated virtualization. Private distance education was the main driver of concentration. By the end of the 2002-2016 period, the private sector contributed to 77% of all concentration, with private distance education alone contributing to 40%.

Marketing in schools has a new twist, and teachers are at the center. Corporate firms, particularly those producing education-technology products, have contracted with teachers to become so-called brand ambassadors and micro-influencers. Scant research, however, has examined these brand ambassador arrangements, leaving policymakers uninformed about the implications for students, teachers, and schools. In this article, we delve into what it means to be a teacher brand ambassador (TBA) and micro-influencer by examining the context in which these programs arose and studying current examples of TBA and TBA-like programs offered by Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. We review how these recent instantiations of marketing compare to similar practices used to sell prescription drugs to and through doctors, and we explore ethical, legal and policy issues associated with the recruitment and contracting of teachers as brand ambassadors. Further, anticipating the need for the protection of students' and teachers' interests as TBA programs grow as a presence in public schools, we offer a model policy framework to regulate the use of these marketing practices in schools.

The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial decision enforced the withholding of data on private ownership and economic spending in education from the public, as transparency was deemed to damage the competitiveness of private schools. Hence, generating profits and business advantage are prioritized over public interests as the organization and provision of education is progressively shaped by privatization. These changes are what prompted us to consider 'what if all education was privatized'? The first part of the article reviews important developments in public education towards privatization and introduces our theoretical framework. The second part draws on aspects of speculative fiction in a dystopian scenario of an imagined educational apocalypse. The scenario starts in contemporary times and ends in 2121 where the education system is dominated by a financial conglomerate called Nescience Ltd. In this technologically advanced society, artificial intelligence systems have replaced educational institutions and teachers. Expensive tuition and fees have made people indebted to Nescience while learning is transformed into the manufacturing of alienated labourers. To understand these economic transitions and the position of Nescience as a knowledge provider in the future, we use the concept of 'zombification' to theorize the infection of privatization in the educational sector.

The present paper aims to highlight the structural problems of the Turkish higher education system by focusing on the problems associated with cost and quality of and access to higher education. These problems manifest themselves in the form of massification, the explosion in the number of public universities without resources and even students, increasing cost of education as inequality and privatization of education are on the rise. Those problems have been exacerbated with the implementation of neoliberal policies that accelerated the decline of the welfare state in Turkey. Populist policies such as opening state universities in every province have not helped with the outcome of such policies: declining quality and increasing cost of higher education, yet let faith-based organizations seize the opportunity of collapsed welfare.

Internationalization has become intertwined with efforts for institutions to compensate for declines in public funding with the development of new revenue streams. The purpose of this study is to understand the social construction of entrepreneurship in internationalization in the United States as well as explore the multiple meanings of entrepreneurship and its contradictions in discourse among senior international officers. The findings discuss and explore competing views, tensions and ethical complexities of the 'new entrepreneurism' increasingly common in internationalization, which blends creative problem-solving with pressures for revenue generation. The findings of this study illustrate that as the world faces genuine existential crises that threaten the continued existence of our species on the planet, internationalization is in the midst of an identity crisis. The drift towards privatization is proving to be increasingly unsustainable and an entirely insufficient response to the existential threats that face the world.

Privatization has grown tremendously in the field of education in India to meet the growing demands for education in society. Privatization of education refers to the transfer of provision of education from the state to private providers with the overall policy goals- (i) Increasing access to and participation in basic education, (ii) Improving learning outcomes and overall efficiency and (iii) Improving equity in educational opportunities (Pedró, et al., 2015). School Education plays an important role in shaping the future of the nation by facilitating all-round development of the student. Keeping in view the increasing popularity and rapid growth of a number of private schools and contributions it made to society also comes with its problems. It is equally important on pragmatic grounds to examine the move towards privatization and its problems. In light of this, the present paper attempts to analyse the problems and prospects of privatization of school education as perceived by parents, teachers and students with special reference to Churachandpur District, Manipur.

Scholars of political economy have raised the question of whether recent populist movements around the world signal the decline of neoliberal hegemony. What would such a decline mean for education policy, an arena that has been dominated by a neoliberal common sense for several decades? This study investigates the policy discourse of former U.S. President Donald Trump's Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, in order to assess the extent to which it aligns with the neoliberal common sense or draws upon discourses of populism that have been gaining traction in the last few years. Using methods of corpus linguistics, I engage in a critical discourse analysis of 59 of DeVos's public speeches delivered between 2017 and 2019 in comparison with a reference corpus of speeches delivered by DeVos's predecessors in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. The findings, informed by Ernesto Laclau's theory of populism as political logic and discourse, suggest that DeVos deploys several features of populist discourse even as she advocates policies that are characteristically neoliberal. I consider the implications of this discourse for education policy in the US.

This article discusses the expression of neoliberalism in Kazakhstan's emerging higher education system. The central tenets of neoliberalism are briefly articulated. Noted is the phenomenon that the general political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism differs in its specific implementation depending on the particular countries and cultures in which it is manifesting. In Kazakhstan, neoliberalism's expression in the former Soviet Republic's emerging higher education system presents five paradoxes: (a) nationalistic globalism, (b) regulated non-regulation, (c) giving as a means to getting, (d) communal individualism, and (e) developmental demise. This article explores each of these five paradoxes.

An important dimension of international comparative analysis in education is studying the models of regulation that structure the way in which educational provision is organized. The specialized literature has defined three predominant regulatory models: the traditional bureaucratic professional model, the quasi-market model inspired by neoliberal thought, and the evaluative state model linked to the notion of new public management. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of analysis by studying the evolution of the Chilean education system since 1980. We describe and analyze the models of regulation that have governed Chilean education and their expression in educational reforms and policies; we assert that Chile has adopted all three mentioned models. We also identify some of the principal consequences of these policies: a highly atomized, privatized, and socioeconomically segregated school system; an improvement in access to education and the conditions for the educational process; and an increase in learning outcomes, despite starting from very low levels and stalling during the past decade while remaining highly unequal in character. Thus, we propose some hypotheses to interpret those changes, relating them to the models of regulation as well as the policies previously analyzed. Overall, we affirm that the market and evaluative state models have achieved modest positive effects while producing relevant undesirable consequences. We conclude the paper with a reflection on the character of the particular hybridization of regulatory models developed in Chile, and the types of policy we believe should be prioritized to improve quality, increase innovation, and diminish inequity.

The neoliberal university which we inhabit is usually discussed in terms of policies, regulations and governing practices. Yet, academic life is steeped in affect. To illustrate that our political positions are imbued with and arise from affective positions, I present three stories of academics from public universities in Sri Lanka. These stories illustrate the discourses, affective attachments, disenchantments and legitimizations through which individuals come to their positions on higher education policy. Specifically, their positions on privatization are tied to affects generated by frustrations, differences with and loyalties to universities with which they are affiliated. Listening to individual voices complicates our understanding of prevailing public positions on higher education policy. Changes in universities across the world are increasingly analogous, and a discussion of affective positions will help us navigate such changes.

External privatisation of public education has emerged in Finland in the admission to higher education. A field analysis of thematic interviews (N = 22) with powerful actors in the private educational market and middle-class young people applying for places at universities in the highly competitive disciplines of medicine and law was conducted. The research task was to examine the discourses that construct the limits of the public and private fields, and the kind of homology that emerges. Four discourses were identified: support, business, social responsibility, and personal responsibility. The private field distinguished itself from the public fields through the discourse of business and attached itself to it through the discourse of support. The dominance of the symbolic power of transformed economic capital in the private field mobilised in the public field was misrecognised during the admission process as 'motivation'. The homology between the two fields was strong yet hidden.

The process of privatising services historically provided by the state has blurred the boundaries between what is considered to be 'private' and 'public'. However, few efforts have been made in the educational arena to develop tools to measure this process. Most of the previous research has relied on narrow definitions about what is private and what is public. This work proposes a tool to measure the degree of publicness-privateness of school systems, avoiding binary separation of the concepts. We develop an index and test this tool in two different landscapes: London and Santiago. In these cases, it serves to illustrate major changes in the levels of public-private participation in both school systems, reflecting differences between the systems and over time. We conclude that the index has potential for development and use in the analysis of public and private dimensions in education in broader international contexts.

This article focuses on the relation between new public management (NPM) reforms and changing patterns of industrial relations (IRs) and social dialogue in the Italian education system. Drawing on data from the research project 'Social dialogue and industrial relations in education: The challenges of multi-level governance and privatisation in Europe' (IR-EDUREFORM), it uses cultural political economy to explore the effects of autonomy, evaluation, and management as policy technologies on teacher unions' collective bargaining, workplace representation and industrial action. Through the Italian case, the study analyses how NPM reforms operated three distinctive transformations: decentralisation of bargaining to school level, juridification and individualisation of industrial action and a shift from collective to professional unions. Beyond critically exploring the implications of NPM reforms and the processes of decollectivation and individualisation of IRs and social dialogue in education, the study also highlights some potential for the emergence of novel sites for collective representation.

While much literature has been produced on globalization, privatization, and the State individually, it has not been common to treat them together, at least not in the field of comparative and international education. There is excellent work that has documented the ways in which globalization and privatization have influenced education reform, but extant scholarship typically has not engaged with theories of the State. In this paper, through the case of Honduras, we explore the aforementioned issues. First, we draw on the approach of Critical International Political Economy (CIPE) to understand the ways that (political-economic) globalization and privatization have affected and manifested in both policymaking and the provision of education. The second half of the paper then turns the gaze back on the Honduran State and draws on State theory literature to consider why globalization and privatization have been able to be so influential in the first place.

While much has been written about student movements against the neoliberal privatisation of education in Chile, less attention has been given to teacher activism around similar educational matters. In this article, we contribute to the field of teacher activism as a social movement to resist the global education reforms of neoliberal education policies/practices. Data for the study were generated through yarning, photo-yarning and testimonios, methods often deployed in Indigenous and mestiza feminist research. Basil Bernstein's theoretical work on pedagogic rights and democratic formations, initially developed in Chile, was used to analyse the data. Teacher activists argued that their collective struggles over what constitutes the public of public education, has interrupted the neoliberal agenda. However, battles over public education, its purposes, who should it serve, remain ongoing. New ways of privatising education are being enacted in Chile that are harder to resist, challenge and change.