Learning To Teach In An Era Of Privatization

Education policymakers often demonstrate surprisingly little awareness of how popular reforms impact teaching and teacher education. In this book, well-regarded scholars help readers develop a more robust understanding of the nature of teacher preparation, as well as an in-depth grasp of how popular policies, practices, and ideologies have taken root domestically and internationally. Contributors include Deron Boyles, Anthony Cody, Kerry Kretchmar, Carmen Montecinos, Beth Sondel, and Christopher Tienken. “This book will help readers consider the possibilities of democratic visions in the teaching profession and in public education, particularly in this time of intense political polarization when critical citizen engagement with our public institutions and policies is deeply needed.” —Janelle Scott, University of California, Berkeley “The chapters in this book make clear that ongoing policy disconnects cannot be ignored and that now is the time to elevate the teaching profession for students who have faced historical inequities.” —Julian Vasquez Heilig, dean, University of Kentucky College of Education “Public teaching and teacher education in the U.S. and in many other parts of the world are under assault by concerted efforts to deregulate and marketize them. This collection of essays examines the consequences of these privatization efforts in the U.S., Chile, and Singapore and should be required reading for those wanting to understand their complexity and consequences for teaching and teacher education today.” —Ken Zeichner, Boeing Professor of Teacher Education, University of Washington

Education privatization is a global phenomenon that has crystallized in countries with very different cultural, political, and economic backgrounds. In this book, the authors examine how privatization policies are being adopted and why so many countries are engaging in this type of education reform. The authors explore the contexts, key personnel, and policy initiatives that explain the worldwide advance of the private sector in education, and identify six different paths toward education privatization—as a drastic state sector reform (e.g., Chile, the U.K.), as an incremental reform (e.g., the U.S.A.), in social-democratic welfare states, as historical public-private partnerships (e.g., Netherlands, Spain), as de facto privatization in low-income countries, and privatization via disaster. Book Features: The first comprehensive, in-depth investigation of the political economy of education privatization at a global scale.An analysis of the different strategies, discourses, and agents that have contributed to advancing (and resisting) education privatization trends. An examination of the role of private corporations, policy entrepreneurs, philanthropic organizations, think-tanks, and teacher unions. “Rich in examples, careful in its analysis, important in its conclusions and recommendations for further work, this book is a vital, rigorous, up-to-date resource for education policy researchers.” —Stephen J. Ball, University College London “Few issues are as significant as is education privatization across the globe; few treatments of this issue offer both the breadth and nuanced understanding that this book does.” —Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University

This book explores the impacts on personal and professional, local and global forms of belonging in educational spaces amidst rapid changes shaped by globalization. Encouraging readers to consider the idea of belonging as an educational goal as much as a guiding educational strategy, this text forms a unique contribution to the field. Drawing on empirical and theoretical analyses, chapters illustrate how educational experience informs a sense of belonging, which is increasingly juxtaposed against a variety of global dynamics including neoliberalism, transnationalism, and global policy and practice discourses. Addressing phenomena such as refugee education, large-scale international assessments, and study abroad, the volume’s focus on ten countries including Japan, Sierra Leone, and the US demonstrates the complexities of globalization and illuminates possibilities for supporting new constructions of belonging in rapidly globalizing educational spaces. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, multicultural education, and educational policy more broadly. Those interested in the sociology of education and cultural studies within education will also benefit from this volume.

This volume offers a timely collection of research-based studies that engage with contemporary conditions of precarity across an array of locations, exploring how it is understood, experienced, and acted upon by educators in schools, universities, and nonformal educational spaces. Precarity presents as layered, unpredictable, destabilizing, and rapidly shifting sociopolitical and economic dynamics, shown here in various forms, including the global pandemic, divisive populist politics, displacement of refugees and the landless, race and gender injustices, and neoliberal policies that constrain educational and social possibilities. Grouped around reflection, educational practice, and social activism, the authors show how educators engage these precarious conditions as they work toward a more interconnected, humane, and just society. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in social foundations of education, multicultural and social justice education, educational policy, and international and comparative education, sociology and anthropology of education, and cultural studies within education, among other fields.

Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education asks how publicness is being redefined through the restructuring of nominally public school systems. Over the past few decades, governments have engineered a wave of reforms in their public systems opening them to privatisation and commercialisation. In public education systems competition, choice and autonomy have become entrenched vectors of these reforms. This edited collection carefully examines the difference between privatisation and commercialisation and traces the varying effects privatised and commercialised policy reforms have had in different educational contexts. Many countries have approached the thorny issues of school choice and school autonomy in different ways, and this book investigates the impact of these agendas across the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and India. This book brings together contemporary, international perspectives from high-profile policy academics on both privatisation and commercialisation in public education systems under the provocation of how the ‘public’ nature of schooling is changing. This is essential reading for those interested in the idea that current education policy reforms are reshaping what might be considered core educational practices in public schooling.

This handbook presents a timeless, comprehensive, and up-to-date resource covering major issues in the field of teacher education research. In a global landscape where migration, inequality, climate change, political upheavals and strife continue to be broadly manifest, governments and scholars alike are increasingly considering what role education systems can play in achieving stability and managed, sustainable economic development. With growing awareness that the quality of education is very closely related to the quality of teachers and teaching, teacher education has moved into a key position in international debate and discussion. This volume brings together transnational perspectives to provide insight and evidence of current policy and practice in the field, covering issues such as teacher supply, preservice education, continuing professional learning, leadership development, professionalism and identity, comparative and policy studies, as well as gender, equity, and social justice.

Decentralisation and Privatisation in Education explores the ambivalent and problematic relationship between the State, privatisation, and decentralisation in education globally. Using a number of diverse paradigms, ranging from critical theory to globalisation, the authors, by focusing on privatisation, marketisation and decentralisation, will attempt to examine critically both the reasons and outcomes of education reforms, policy change and transformation and provide a more informed critique on the Western-driven models of accountability, quality and school effectiveness. We want to demonstrate that claims of advantages in ‘efficiency’ brought about by privatisation in education are not always supported empirically as proposed by proponents. The book examines the overall interplay between privatisation, decentralisation and the role of the state. The authors draw upon recent studies in the areas of decentralisation, privatisation and the role of the state in education. By referring to Bourdieu’s call for critical policy analysts to engage in a ‘critical sociology’ of their own contexts of practice, and poststructuralist and postmodernist pedagogy, this collection of book chapters demonstrate how central discourses surrounding the debate of privatisation, decentralisation and the role of the state are formed in the contexts of dominant ideology, power, and culturally and historically derived perceptions and practices. The authors discuss the newly constructed and re-invented imperatives of privatisation, decentralisation and marketisation and show how they may well be operating as an educational model of a new global ‘master narrative’— playing a hegemonic role within the framework of economic, political and cultural hybrids of globalization.

It’s All About Learning: The Struggle in Choosing Traditional Public Education or Privatization is a reckoning with the contemporary struggle over choice about learning in public education. The future for learning depends on choice aligned with one of two major perspectives: traditional public education or privatization education. The profound implications of this struggle are too important to focus on gadgets, technology, and adult-centric intentions, also known as “chasing rabbits.” Instead, this book examines the purpose, intentions, and consequences of the perspectives battling for control of learning and teaching. When this conflict is resolved, a choice for learning will emerge: how to think or what-to-think. Who will write the narrative for the history of the future of US public education that best serves all students and the democracy in which they live? A reckoning with the struggle over choice about learning is past due. This book makes it clear that the time has come for traditional public educators to bypass the marketplace of privatization education and prioritize student-centric learning in traditional US public education.