Helen Ladd, Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University, and her husband Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times, have written a comprehensive review of England’s radical experiment in school autonomy. The United Kingdom has been thrashing around in search of a managerial solution to school problems. It introduced a national curriculum for Schools in England, Wales, Northern Ireland in 1988, defining what every student should know in every grade, soon followed by national tests. (Wales soon delinked from the national curriculum.) Dissatisfied by the results, England is now embarking rapidly on radical decentralization of its schools.
What began as a limited program under a Labor government seeking “third way” reforms to encourage wealthy investors to take charge of some secondary schools has mushroomed under a Conservative government into a full-blown effort to devolve governmental responsibility for most of the nation’s state-run schools.
In their study released by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Ladd and Fiske assess the prospects and downsides of this approach.
“While the growth of charter schools from two in Minnesota in 1992 to nearly 7,000 across the country today has been stunning, this transformation of the educational landscape in the United States pales in comparison to what has happened in nearly half the time in England.
“Authorized by legislation in 2000 and officially launched in 2002, academies are England’s answer to charter schools. They are former state schools funded by the central government and granted significant operational autonomy. There are now 5,302 academies. Free schools, introduced in 2010, are academies by another name, created by teachers, charities, parents, or religious groups. There are now 304 free schools. The former Conservative prime minister David Cameron and his education secretary, Michael Gove, pledged in March 2016 to make all of England’s 20,000 government-funded schools into academies or free schools to give parents more choice and school administrators more freedom. Their target date for this complete transformation was 2022. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, and her education secretary, Justine Greening, have so far stood behind this pledge.
“England’s academies and free schools stand out for not only their rapid growth but also their substantial autonomy. While oversubscribed charter schools in the United States must employ lotteries for admission, academies and free schools have control over whom they admit. The result, according to an analysis summarized by The Guardian, has been significant segregation of students by class as well as academic achievement.
“In “England Confronts the Limits of School Autonomy,” Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske provide a detailed analysis of the evolution of school choice in England and address the obstacles in the way of full implementation of Conservative Party ambitions as well as its likely drawbacks. Ladd, a professor of economics and public policy at Duke University, and Fiske, a former education editor at The New York Times, ground their working paper in interviews conducted last spring in London with 24 government officials, school leaders, and researchers; and in numerous government reports and academic studies. The result is a rich depiction of dramatic change and a cautionary statement about the impact of full school independence on community input and student interests.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The neo conservative-liberal movements that came out of the University of Chicago seem to have reached far beyond the United States and are obviously spreading like a terminal cancer across the globe.
The goals of these two revived fascist movements using different labels is to strip power from the people by shrinking the power of the governments of participatory democracies to the point where there is no power to limit the free market from doing anything it wants to make a profit, anything.
neoconservative out of the University of Chicago started in the Democratic party and then migrated to the GOP under President Reagan.
Neoconservatism draws on several intellectual traditions. The students of political science Professor Leo Strauss (1899–1973) comprised one major group. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, and in 1949 he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, holding the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship until he left in 1969.
O’Neill (2009) notes that Strauss wrote little about American topics but his students wrote a great deal, and that Strauss’s influence caused his students to reject historicism and positivism. Instead they promoted a so-called Aristotelian perspective on America that produced a qualified defense of its liberal constitutionalism.
Neoliberalism refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy. Another center-left movement from modern American liberalism that used the term “Neoliberalism” to describe its ideology formed in the United States in the 1970s. According to David Brooks, prominent neoliberal politicians included Al Gore and Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party of the United States. Milton Friedman, who also taught at the University of Chicago, promoted this thinking.
In her book The Shock Doctrine, author and social activist Naomi Klein criticized Friedman’s economic liberalism, identifying it with the principles that guided the economic restructuring that followed the military coups in countries such as Chile and Indonesia. Based on their assessments of the extent to which what she describes as neoliberal policies contributed to income disparities and inequality, both Klein and Noam Chomsky have suggested that the primary role of what they describe as neoliberalism was as an ideological cover for capital accumulation by multinational corporations.
LikeLike
As Pasi Sahlberg has clearly pointed out, “no privatized system of education has ever worked.” All attempts to privatize schools have led to a disinvestment in the common good, increased levels of inequity, and greater segregation. Chile, Sweden, Egypt, and now England have been a disaster of privatization. We already have witnessed the ill effects of privatization in our country. Sahlberg has also pointed out that America does not suffer from failing public schools; it suffers from gross inequality. It is time to change course before we waste more resources on ineffective, inequitable splinter schools. It is time to invest in strong, equitable public schools.
LikeLike
“The result, according to an analysis summarized by The Guardian, has been significant segregation of students by class as well as academic achievement.’
That is part of the plan for the US promoted by bloated foundations and networks of these targeting public schools and publc universities as inequitable, ineffective, and too costly.
LikeLike