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In an era of expanding global educational privatization and shifting policies on how to fund educational facilities in many states in the US, this study engages the lenses of critical policy analysis and fiscal sociology to examine educational privatization in the school facilities industry in California. Employing critical policy document analysis to examine approximately 40 primary and secondary source documents including propositions, bills, government and education codes, facilities reports, and state public debt data, this paper addresses the following research question: How have education finance policies shaped the system of school district facilities financing over time, specifically with regard to the field of private actors involved in the school facilities industry? This paper examines the historical policy context for privatization in school district facilities financing, evaluating how policies have evolved, been implemented, and affected stakeholders over time in the broader neoliberal context. Findings indicate that policies promoting privatization in education finance impact school districts’ abilities to provide equitable facilities to their students. Also, the complex and intermittent process of financing school facilities has facilitated the rise of specialized private actors in the school facilities industry that has now organized to engage in private-sector policy setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to the sociological analysis of power through the study of the structuration and retrieval of information on the internet. The main argument of the paper is that, paradoxically, in an age when the availability of information has increased exponentially, there is a risk that diversity in the use of sources for the construction of knowledge becomes more restricted than in the past and that information search moves towards greater objectification and centralisation. Knowledge management systems increasingly shape the ways in which we think about the questions we ask and how we try to answer them, which raises fundamental and largely neglected questions for education policy. The paper illustrates these trends with particular reference to the use of Google and Google Scholar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, one policy response to the problem of classed school choice experiences in England is examined. ‘Choice Advisers’ are employed by government to provide advice and information to working class and disadvantaged parents with the aim of ‘empowering’ them to exercise school choice and aspire to ‘better’ schools for their children. However, Advisers have been subjectified by contradictions inherent in policy, expected to solve the problems of school choice in a context of significant structural limits to choice for working-class parents. Interviews with choice Advisers show that difficulties of the job in addition to insecure working conditions within local authorities have led to depoliticised, contradictory advice and Advisers bearing the brunt of policy both in terms of overwork and the venting of parental frustrations. Agency, both for parents and for Advisers themselves, is described as being something possessed by individuals rather than collectives, so there is little sense overall that underlying inequalities within the education system might be challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]