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Relatively few studies have explored the ways in which 'middle tier' institutional arrangements in education, such as school districts and local authorities, are responding to New Public Management reforms characterized by centralization, decentralization, marketization and disintermediation. This paper analyses these issues, drawing on governance and path dependency theories, together with evidence from five locality case studies in England. It finds that the process and impact of 'middle tier' disintermediation is uneven and often fraught, with significant implications for place-based coherence, equity and legitimacy. It shows how national hierarchical mechanisms work in concert to require and/or incentivise change across local school systems, most obviously by reducing the remit and capacity of traditional Local Authorities. This process can open up new opportunities for emerging and existing actors to work together through network and community forms of governance to counteract the negative impact of fragmentation, a process dubbed 'middle out' change. However, responses and outcomes vary widely across the five localities and productive 'middle out' change is by no means a given, so the article analyses the processes at work and their impact across different contexts. It concludes by assessing implications for research, policy and practice in contemporary education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public schooling: (1) the commissioning of national assessment strategy policy advice, and (2) the award of contestable funding for the provision of support services to schools. It is argued that such practices advance neoliberal theories of schooling at the expense of the previous social democratic liberal settlement. The paper considers some possible consequences of increased privatisation of policy advice and service provision for understandings of and commitments to public schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education policy. The paper is a conceptual and thematic attempt to understand the policy terrain, broadly conceived, pertaining to opposition to the establishment of private Islamic schools in Australia and public Afrocentric schools in Canada. This opposition is located within complex policy terrains relating to multiculturalism, whiteness and race/racism. The paper focuses on the complex racialised politics surrounding education policy initiatives that support marketisation and choice in private and public K-12 schooling – with an interest in what forms of choice are legitimated in and by a racialised education market. The paper concludes that opposition to Islamic and Afrocentric schooling highlights the ambiguity of equity, and the fragility of identity in racialised education policy environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that the logic of neoliberal choice policy is typically blind to considerations of space and place, but inevitably impacts on rural and remote locations in the way that middle-class professionals view the opportunities available in their local educational markets. The paper considers the value of middle-class professionals’ educational capitals in regional communities and their problematic distribution, given that class fraction’s particular investment in choice strategies to ensure their children’s future. It then profiles the educational market in six communities along a transect between a major regional centre and a remote ‘outback’ town, using publicly available data from the Australian Government’s My School website. Comparison of the local markets shows how educational outcomes are distributed across the local markets and how dimensions of ‘choice’ thin out over the transect. Interview data offer insights into how professional families in these localities engage selectively with these local educational markets or plan to transcend them. The discussion reflects on the growing importance of educational choices as a marker of place in the competition between localities to attract and retain professionals to staff vital human services in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as ‘marketization’ in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world. Our account of this process of ‘market making’ is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, we identify a range ofmarket exchangesthat have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, we explore the ways in whichmaking marketsinvolve a considerable amount of microwork, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio-technical tools. Taken together, these market-making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the establishment of three alternative programs within a school district over time to explore the assumption that such programs reflect families' preferences and that consumer demand dictates their survival. We examine differences in discourses around alternative programs that relate to the type of program and when, why, and by whom it was introduced. Our analysis suggests that the school district played a critical role in constructing the market by determining provision, and that the process of establishing an alternative program required access to particular forms of social and cultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic market in the first-degree education of domestic students. No research university is driven by shareholders, profit, market share, allocative efficiency or the commodity form. There is commercial tuition only in parts of vocational training and international education. While intensified competition, entrepreneurship and consumer talk are pervasive in higher education, capitalism is not very important. At the most, there are regulated quasi-markets, as in post-Browne UK. This differs from the experience of privatisation and commercialisation of transport, communications, broadcasting and health insurance in many nations. The article argues that bona fide market reform in higher education is constrained by intrinsic limits specific to the sector (public goods, status competition), and political factors associated with those limits. This suggests that market reform is utopian, and the abstract ideal is sustained for exogenous policy reasons (e.g. fiscal reduction, state control, ordering of contents). But, if capitalist markets are clearly unachievable, a more authentic modernisation agenda is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]