Marketization and privatization in mass education systems

Abstract

Recent education reform in many countries has sought to dismantle centralized educational bureaucracies to create systems that emphasize parental choice and competition between schools, thereby creating quasi-markets in educational services. In addition to this widespread marketization of public education systems, publicly financed and provided education services have been privatized. In this paper, marketization and privatization policies are compared, and initial research evidence on the impact of marketization and privatization in England, the USA, Australia and New Zealand is examined in the light of the claims about diversity of provision, efficiency, effectiveness and equity. Also considered in the significance of attempts currently underway in the UK and elsewhere to temper the emphasis on consumer rights within policies of marketization and privatization with a renewed concern for the citizen rights traditionally associated with social-democratic approaches to education policy.