Comparing neo-liberal projects and inequality in education

In this article, I pay particular attention to some of the most important dynamics surrounding globalisation in education-the increasingly powerful discourses and polices of neoliberalism concerning privatisation, marketisation, performativity, and the 'enterprising individual'. While I demonstrate the truly international effects of neo-liberal policies-and the differential realities they tend to produce in real schools-I also suggest that we cannot simply read off the effects of these policies in the abstract. Their uses and effects are historically contingent. They are at least partly dependent on the balance of forces in each nation and on the histories of the ways progressive tendencies have already been instituted within the state. Yet, I also suggest that any analysis of these discourses and policies must critically examine their class and race and gender effects at the level of who benefits from their specific institutionalisations and from their contradictory functions within real terrains of social power.