Mapping Corporate Education Reform outlines and analyzes the complex relationships between policy actors that define education reform within the current, neoliberal context. Using social network analysis and powerful data visualization tools, the authors identify the problematic roots of these relationships and describe their effects both in the U.S. and abroad. Through a series of case studies, each chapter reveals how powerful actors, from billionaire philanthropists to multinational education corporations, leverage their resources to implement free market mechanisms within public education. By comprehensively connecting the dots of neoliberal education reforms, the authors reveal not only the details of the reforms themselves, but the relationships that enable actors to amass troubling degrees of political power through network governance. A critical analysis of the actors and interests behind education policies, Mapping Corporate Education Reform uncovers the frequently obscured operations of educational governance and offers key insights into education reform at the present moment.

Mapping Corporate Education Reform outlines and analyzes the complex relationships between policy actors that define education reform within the current, neoliberal context. Using social network analysis and powerful data visualization tools, the authors identify the problematic roots of these relationships and describe their effects both in the U.S. and abroad. Through a series of case studies, each chapter reveals how powerful actors, from billionaire philanthropists to multinational education corporations, leverage their resources to implement free market mechanisms within public education. By comprehensively connecting the dots of neoliberal education reforms, the authors reveal not only the details of the reforms themselves, but the relationships that enable actors to amass troubling degrees of political power through network governance. A critical analysis of the actors and interests behind education policies, Mapping Corporate Education Reform uncovers the frequently obscured operations of educational governance and offers key insights into education reform at the present moment.

Dismantled is an accessible, critical look at the devolution of local power in the Detroit public school system. The author examines the rise of charter schools and other private enterprises, the eclipse of control from local actors to new players and influences, and the invaluable lessons the experience holds for urban school systems nationwide. Kang provides a compelling narrative of this shift in power beginning in the 1980s and leading to the breakup of Detroit Public Schools in 2016, and concludes with a discussion on the implications and dilemmas of regime change. The text looks at such questions as: What happens when local actors no longer have a voice in what happens to their schools? What are the consequences when teachers and administrators cede control to private interests and cease to participate in decisionmaking? What are some ways to redirect public schooling towards democracy in the aftermath of dismantling the Progressive Era system? Book Features: Examines how a series of policies dismantled the Detroit Public Schools, resulting in new educational characteristics such as the marketization and privatization of schooling. Offers an historical perspective on market-based reform, including why and how race and politics serve as barriers to reform. Explains the role and influence of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in the Detroit events. Provides a framework from which to envision the next steps for public education in the 21st century.

The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform examines educational reform from a global perspective. Comprised of approximately 25 original and specially commissioned essays, which together interrogate educational reform from a critical global and transnational perspective, this volume explores a range of topics and themes that fully investigate global convergences in educational reform policies, ideologies, and practices. The Handbook probes the history, ideology, organization, and institutional foundations of global educational reform movements; actors, institutions, and agendas; and local, national, and global education reform trends. It further examines the “new managerialism” in global educational reform, including the standardization of national systems of educational governance, curriculum, teaching, and learning through the rise of new systems of privatization, accountability, audit, big-data, learning analytics, biometrics, and new technology-driven adaptive learning models. Finally, it takes on the subjective and intersubjective experiential dimensions of the new educational reforms and alternative paths for educational reform tied to the ethical imperative to reimagine education for human flourishing, justice, and equality. An authoritative, definitive volume and the first global take on a subject that is grabbing headlines as well as preoccupying policy makers, scholars, and teachers around the world Edited by distinguished leaders in the field Features contributions from an illustrious list of experts and scholars The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of education throughout the world as well as the policy makers who can institute change.

An ethnography of Russian teacher education reforms as scripted performances of political theater. Around the world, countries undertake teacher education reforms in response to international norms and assessments. Russia has been no exception. Elena Aydarova develops a unique theatrical framework to tell the story of a small group of reformers who enacted a major reform to modernize teacher education in Russia. Based on scripts circulated in global policy networks and ideologies of national development, this reform was implemented despite great opposition—but how? Drawing on extensive ethnographic material, Aydarova teases out the contradictions in this process. Teacher Education Reform as Political Theater reveals how the official story of improving education obscured dramatic and, ultimately, socially conservative changes in the purposes of schooling, the nature and perception of teachers’ work, and the design of teacher education. Despite the official rhetoric, Aydarova argues, modernization reforms such as we see in the Russian context normalize social inequality and put educational systems at the service of global corporations. As similar dramas unfold around the world, this book considers how members of scholarly communities and the broader public can respond to reformers’ stories of crises and urgent calls for reform on other national stages. “This book provides an unprecedented ethnographic look into the making of national education policy. The setting, amazingly, is Russia, but the volume raises questions about how ideas become policy in other nations as well. It is thus a highly provocative and fascinating case study that should get the attention of anyone interested in national and global education policymaking.” — Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, coeditor of Comparing Ethnographies: Local Studies of Education Across the Americas

This book reviews one hundred years of educational reforms worldwide. Characterized by a tension between governing public and professional forces, the waves of educational reform reflect myriad efforts to define and fulfill professional and public expectations for the world of education. The first wave of reform, based on “progressive” ideals, spread across the globe after World War I, striving to place the student at the center of the education process and respond to the diverse needs of children and youth in a world that included massive population shifts. The second wave nearly obliterated the ideals of the progressive movement that had prevailed for sixty years. Drawing its principles from the business world, the second wave imposed competition, uniform standards, and measurable outputs on students, teachers, and schools, even at the cost of harming at-risk populations and encouraging the infiltration of private sector values into public education systems.The third wave was launched at the turn of the twenty-first century. Seeking to adjust instructional methods to modern reality, this reform rejected standardized curricula in favor of developing skills such as independent thinking, curiosity, innovation, collaboration among learners, and the ability to mine and process information. Book I reviews the three waves of reform in the United States, England, Canada, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and Finland. Book II focuses on Israel’s education system — past, present, and future.

This book envisions the formulation of critical perspectives on education reform using the Philippine experience, recognizing the need to address relevant issues and challenges particularly in an increasingly globalized twenty-first century setting. A specific education reform project, the Leaders and Educators in Asia Programme (LEAP), a joint effort between the Philippines’ Department of Education, the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, the National Institute of Education-Singapore and Singapore’s Temasek Foundation, serves as the analytical focus of how education reform as a globalized movement is implemented, interpreted and made sense of by stakeholders involved in the reform project. This inquiry proposes to examine the problematique of education reform – from a Philippine perspective – by focusing on three analytical starting points: (1) describing the most relevant and urgent issues of education reform; (2) diagnosing the causes and consequences of reform failures; and (3) developing critical and contextualized perspectives on reform trajectories. Mapping the Terrain of Education Reforms: Global trends and local responses in the Philippines discusses the following: Challenges against effective education reforms The oscillation between global and local imperatives The dissociation between policymakers and practitioners Education reform aid in the Philippines This book will be of interest to researchers interested in education policy, politics, and reforms. It will also appeal to scholars examining Asian, and particularly Southeast Asian, educational systems.