Multiple Institutional Paths of Multicultural Education: Comparing the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Why has multicultural education developed differently in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, politically and culturally similar countries? I address this question with a historical and comparative study of how these three nations responded differently to the same global institutional trends. I show how not only did the existing institutional and ideological architecture of each country filter how it adopted the logic of pluralism that spread multiculturalism throughout the Anglo-American world in the 1960s and 1970s but that the resulting institutional settlement in each country was in turn unsettled by the neoliberal market logic that reshaped national education systems in the 1980s and 1990s, in turn altering domestic multicultural policies. Overall, this paper shows that not only do nation-level differences shape institutional change but do so through the accumulation of solutions to particular framings of domestic problems in the context of the global institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]