Abstract
Current policy environments worldwide are heavily influenced by corporatism, neoliberalism, and their companion, New Public Management. These are discussed here. This chapter also wrestles with such concepts as individualism and collectivism, nationalism, and competition and collaboration, among others, as foundational concerns. This chapter presents a discussion of current educational reform initiatives and the lessons learned from them through their analysis. Charter schools and, to a lesser extent, the linking of teacher and school assessment, along with the assessment of teacher education programs, to student achievement test results are used as illustrative examples.
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Notes
- 1.
Note how, in Sleeter’s (2007) analysis, competition and individualism play prominent roles in this ideology or way of thinking.
- 2.
True, the status of these online universities is still questionable, as several states, including ours of Texas, have to date refused to grant, for example, teaching or administrative certificates to those who graduate such programs, denying such programs full accreditation.
- 3.
Other pressures on university professors that also heavily impinge upon their time, and hence their academic freedom, are occasioned by their having to chase grant money (and then, if successful, run the grant). More and more university positions are being created in which the candidate is expected to make up all, or a large portion, of his/her salary through grant money recapture, a type of bring-your-own-salary scheme.
- 4.
It amazes us how even the most progressive lawmakers and policy makers can be so conservative, almost reactionary, when it comes to education and educational policy, President Obama and his education rhetoric being a case in point.
- 5.
We have it on good authority, for example, that the international media mogul and billionaire, Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, made a devil’s bargain with the Obama election team that, in exchange for helping get him elected US president, Murdoch and his associates would have control over the education agenda in the USA. There is every indication that he was similarly behind the UK’s Every Child Matters education policy initiative.
- 6.
Statement of disclosure: Duncan Waite, the first author of this chapter, sits on the editorial board of a journal owned by the University of Phoenix, The Journal of Leadership Studies.
- 7.
As evidence of the financial attractiveness of charter schools, and the pecuniary tilt of education broadly, the Texas board of education recently voted to invest 100 million USD from the Permanent School Fund it oversees to develop and lease charter schools to private companies (Alexander 2010), expecting a hefty return on its investment. Fortunately, and for the time being, the plan has been put on hold.
- 8.
Likely each country has its sociohistorical landscape of private/parochial/public school issues with which to contend and which flavor the national debate. For instance, in both Ireland and Denmark, the government funds both public and parochial schools: in Ireland, because the Catholic Church is so strong, culturally as well as politically, and in Denmark, because the number of religious, parochial schools is small relative to the overall size of the Danish system.
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Waite, D., RodrÃguez, G., Wadende, A. (2015). Globalization and the Business of Educational Reform. In: Zajda, J. (eds) Second International Handbook on Globalisation, Education and Policy Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9493-0_21
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