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Advancing a powerful critique of neoliberalized education in many of the rich countries of the world (USA, Canada, Finland, Greece, Israel, Japan, England and Wales, and others), the chapters in this book, written by an international array of acclaimed and emerging radical educators and policy analysts, critically examine and evaluate: What neoliberal changes have taken place (e.g., privatization, vouchers, charter schools, weakening of democratic control of schools, setting up markets in schools and retreating from the comprehensive school principle, commercialization of education, new public managerialism in education)? What are the impacts of these changes on access and equal opportunities, on democracy and critical thinking, and on the rights, pay and conditions of teachers and ancillary/support staff? Dave Hill is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Northampton, England, and Chief Editor of the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, online at www.jceps.com. He is Routledge Series Editor for Education and Neoliberalism and for Education and Marxism. He is a Socialist political activist, former Labour Parliamentary candidate, Labour Council Group Leader, and trade union regional leader. Foreword: The World is Not Flat: Challenging Neoliberal Policies David Hursh 1. Introduction: Neoliberal Politics and Education in the Rich World: Inequality, Undemocracy and the Resistant Possibilities and Roles of Critical Educators Dave Hill 2. The American Privatization Campaign: Vouchers, Charters, Educational Management Organizations and the Money Behind Them Karen Anijar and David Gabbard 3. Neoliberalism and Education in Canada Adam Davidson-Harden, Larry Kuehn, Daniel Schugurensky and Harry Smaller 4. The New Built Environment of Education: Neo-liberalism on Trial in Australia Gregory Martin 5. England and Wales: Neoliberalised Education and its Impacts Christine Lewis, Dave Hill and Barry Fawcett 6. Changing the Tide of Education Policy in Finland: From Nordic to EU Educational Policy Model Joel Kivirauma, Risto Rinne and Piia Seppänen 7. The Neoliberal - Neoconservative Reform in Greek Education Georgios Grollios 8. The Third Way and Beyond: Global Neo-liberalism, Education and Resistance in Taiwan Hui-Lan Wang and Michael Loncar 9. Israel: Neoliberal and Nationalist Education: Towards a Political Pedagogy Aura Mor-Sommerfeld, Ehud Adiv and Arnon Dunetz 10. Education in a One Party 'Democracy': Singapore Steve McKenna and Julia Richardson 11. Education Reforms in Japan: Neo-Liberal, Neo-Conservative, and \"Progressive Education\" Directions Kaori H. Okano . Contributors. Index.

Identity Economicsprovides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities--and not just economic incentives--influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people--facing the same economic circumstances--would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration--and ofIdentity Economics. The authors explain how our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions--at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures--and much, much more. Identity Economicsbridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity--their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be--may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being.

Why have governments responded to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in such different ways? During the past quarter century, international agencies and donors have disseminated vast resources and a set of best practice recommendations to policymakers around the globe. Yet the governments of developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean continue to implement widely varying policies.Boundaries of Contagionis the first systematic, comparative analysis of the politics of HIV/AIDS. The book explores the political challenges of responding to a stigmatized condition, and identifies ethnic boundaries--the formal and informal institutions that divide societies--as a central influence on politics and policymaking. Evan Lieberman examines the ways in which risk and social competition get mapped onto well-institutionalized patterns of ethnic politics. Where strong ethnic boundaries fragment societies into groups, the politics of AIDS are more likely to involve blame and shame-avoidance tactics against segments of the population. In turn, government leaders of such countries respond far less aggressively to the epidemic. Lieberman's case studies of Brazil, South Africa, and India--three developing countries that face significant AIDS epidemics--are complemented by statistical analyses of the policy responses of Indian states and over seventy developing countries. The studies conclude that varied patterns of ethnic competition shape how governments respond to this devastating problem. The author considers the implications for governments and donors, and the increasing tendency to identify social problems in ethnic terms.

In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. Hanushek and Woessmann contend that the cognitive skills of the population -- which they term the \"knowledge capital\" of a nation -- are essential to long-run prosperity. Hanushek and Woessmann subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the \"Latin American growth puzzle\" and the \"East Asian miracle\" can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance.

Autism is associated with a range of costs. This paper reviews the literature on estimating the economic costs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). More or less 50 papers covering multiple countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc.) were analysed. Six types of costs are discussed in depth: (i) medical and healthcare service costs, (ii) therapeutic costs, (iii) (special) education costs, (iv) costs of production loss for adults with ASD, (v) costs of informal care and lost productivity for family/caregivers, and (vi) costs of accommodation, respite care, and out-of-pocket expenses. A general finding is that individuals with ASD and families with children with ASD have higher costs. Education costs appear to be a major cost component for parents with children with ASD.

Global population trends The increasing wealth of nations is accompanied by a fall in fertility, so that in many developed (and developing) nations, fertility rates have dropped below the replacement value of about 2.1 births per woman. This 'birth dearth', together with the ageing of populations, presents many difficult social and political problems. But, based on new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the relationship between the total fertility rate and the human development index, Myrskylä et al . show that above a certain degree of economic development, fertility once again begins to rise, slowing the rate at which populations age. As a consequence, in contrast to the current popular and scientific debates, it seems likely that countries at the most advanced development stages will face a relatively stable population size, if not an increase in total population in cases where immigration is substantial. The increasing wealth of nations is accompanied by a fall in fertility such that in many developed and developing nations fertility rates have dropped below replacement value (less than 2.1 children per woman). Rapid population ageing, and in some cases the prospect of significant population decline, present difficult social and political problems. However, it is now shown that above a certain degree of economic development fertility begins to rise once again. During the twentieth century, the global population has gone through unprecedented increases in economic and social development that coincided with substantial declines in human fertility and population growth rates 1 , 2 . The negative association of fertility with economic and social development has therefore become one of the most solidly established and generally accepted empirical regularities in the social sciences 1 , 2 , 3 . As a result of this close connection between development and fertility decline, more than half of the global population now lives in regions with below-replacement fertility (less than 2.1 children per woman) 4 . In many highly developed countries, the trend towards low fertility has also been deemed irreversible 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 . Rapid population ageing, and in some cases the prospect of significant population decline, have therefore become a central socioeconomic concern and policy challenge 10 . Here we show, using new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the total fertility rate and the human development index (HDI), a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century. Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium HDI levels, our analyses show that at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility. The previously negative development–fertility relationship has become J-shaped, with the HDI being positively associated with fertility among highly developed countries. This reversal of fertility decline as a result of continued economic and social development has the potential to slow the rates of population ageing, thereby ameliorating the social and economic problems that have been associated with the emergence and persistence of very low fertility.

Gender differences in math performance are now small in developed countries and they cannot explain on their own the strong underrepresentation of women in math-related fields. This latter result is however no longer true once gender differences in reading performance are also taken into account. Using individual-level data on 300,000 15-y-old students in 64 countries, we show that the difference between a student performance in reading and math is 80% of a standard deviation (SD) larger for girls than boys, a magnitude considered as very large. When this difference is controlled for, the gender gap in students’ intentions to pursue math-intensive studies and careers is reduced by around 75%, while gender gaps in self-concept in math, declared interest for math or attitudes toward math entirely disappear. These latter variables are also much less able to explain the gender gap in intentions to study math than is students’ difference in performance betweenmath and reading. These results are in line with choice models in which educational decisions involve intraindividual comparisons of achievement and self-beliefs in different subjects as well as cultural norms regarding gender. To directly show that intraindividual comparisons of achievement impact students’ intended careers, we use differences across schools in teaching resources dedicated to math and reading as exogenous variations of students’ comparative advantage for math. Results confirm that the comparative advantage in math with respect to reading at the time of making educational choices plays a key role in the process leading to women’s under-representation in math-intensive fields.

Over the last few decades, globalization and ever-increasing demands of the knowledge-based economy have caused higher education in most countries around the world to undergo significant transformation. Notwithstanding the dramatic changes in higher education, it is clearly noticed that the influence of the European higher education models is still present despite the fact that the American model has then become dominant on higher education in Europe or even worldwide. The changes have been seen in the evolutionary roles of universities, which share the common trend from traditional missions of teaching and research to the third mission for economic development. Despite various viewpoints about the third mission, the common one concerns the entrepreneurial role of university for socio-economic development, underlying the concept of entrepreneurial university in which the collaboration between university and external stakeholders is emphasized. This paper is aimed to present a review of the taxonomy of the three European higher education models, namely the Humboldtian, Napoleonic, and Anglo-Saxon model, which is followed by a discussion on the emergence of the Anglo-American model of higher education. The paper then presents the third mission in relation to the roles of a university in developed countries, which is followed by the elaboration on the transformation from mode 1 to mode 2 in knowledge production, and a pathway toward entrepreneurial universities.

Based on twenty-five years of fieldwork, Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy: A Critical Perspective on Development examines rural women's behaviors towards health in several developing countries.These women are confronted with many factors: gender inequalities, violence from partners, and lack of economic independence.