Search results

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

As comparativists of education are well aware, over the second half of the 20th century there was a dramatic increase in the pace of educational expansion around the world. This revolution has made the world a schooled place both in terms of enrollment rates and increased average total years in schooling. What has been particularly noticeable is the degree to which governments in all types of nations have come to see that education plays a central role in the future development of the nation's human capital, and in turn governments have become the main providers of schooling. This alone is a significant shift from anything ever seen before the 20th century. Further this remarkable expansion of education has fostered notable homogeneity of goals, aims, and basic organizational forms of elementary and secondary schooling and, more recently, higher education.

Entrepreneurial approaches to public mass education are not easily developed or managed by public sector institutions. Instead, private sector entities are often responsible for the development and implementation of innovative and entrepreneurial education. Part of the reason may be the resistance to change that isomorphism in mass education engenders, but the involvement of privately-funded, organized, and managed organizations plays a significant role as well. Private sector-driven educational change has become the dominant mode of entrepreneurship in 21st century national educational systems, but there are challenges and obstacles to privately managing public sector institutions such as education and the activities or curricula that comprise its core. To understand this phenomena the promises and challenges for innovation and entrepreneurship are discussed through an institutional framework.

Successful school reform requires a paradigm shift which begins with unlocking the school’s existing culture before attempts are made to integrate reform variables. Reengineering, and rethinking and radical redesign of internal processes calls for discarding current practices and reinventing better ways to supply products and services. Holistic thinking, cross‐sectional configurations, proactive behaviour patterns, reward for innovation and creativity, and the demise of traditional infrastructures are essential for facilitating fluid social, economic and political trends into the 21st century. Educators must think differently about the purpose of schools and their delivery and redesign infrastructures which are built on shared values and beliefs, multiple interacting linkages and teamwork. School leaders are the catalysts for change and, working with the school’s power agents and modeling expected behaviours, motivate teachers to replace the old culture with new processes of schooling. Shared ownership of case values, realistic and achievable goals and collaboration places the responsibility for creating a reengineered delivery system on teachers themselves.

In this chapter we draw on research from Canada to develop a framework for understanding the variety of forms of supplementary education and their position within broader organization fields of education. The chapter asks: What is the nature and organizing logic of supplementary education in Canada? and, How does supplementary education relate to public schools in Canada?

Data come from a variety of secondary sources.

Distributed between three relatively autonomous settings – state, market, and nonprofit – supplementary education exhibits tremendous variety in its use value to parents, instructional content, and organizational form. Supplementary education is popular among Canadian parents and appears to be growing, yet it has failed to fundamentally alter the technical core of Canadian schooling, processes that stratify students, and child and family usage of their time or income. Supplementary education’s inability to penetrate these processes reflects its peripheral position within the broader organizational field of Canadian schooling.

The adoption of an organizational field approach generates new ways of thinking about determinants, forming and organizing logics of supplementary education both nationally and comparatively.

Restructuring schools as a means to quality improvement in education is one of the major challenges facing education in Malta. This article calls for a critique of school policy‐making and planning processes. Attention is directed towards school‐based development with focus on the school as the unit of change. School development is described as a process by which a school develops the capacity for reflective action. It is a planned, continuing effort, with personnel committed to a search for increasing school effectiveness and expresses a commitment towards professional growth. The article stresses the need for policy and decision makers to fundamentally rethink the way schools function at present by shifting attention towards establishing a professionally oriented structure which gives educators at school level more responsibility, accountability and professionalism.

This article proposes the concept of an ethic of community to complement and extend other ethical frames used in education (e.g. the ethics of justice, critique, and care). Proceeding from the traditional definition of ethics as the study of moral duty and obligation, ethic of community is defined as the moral responsibility to engage in communal processes as educators pursue the moral purposes of their work and address the ongoing challenges of daily life and work in schools. The ethic of community thus centers the communal over the individual as the primary locus of moral agency in schools. The usefulness of the ethic of community in regard to achieving the moral purposes of schooling is illustrated with the example of social justice. The author concludes that the ethic of community is a vehicle that can synthesize much of the current work on leadership practices related to social justice and other moral purposes of educational leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and validate the process of parent teacher meeting in private schools through applying BPM life-cycle approach and using quality tools to fill the gap of standardized practices for parent teacher meeting (PTM).

BPM life-cycle approach (Dumas et al., 2013) was used and two focus groups were conducted at first and second stage. The recommendations of previous studies for third, fourth and fifth stage of BPM and quality tools like SIPOC chart, responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) and CTQ trees were used for process management.

The previous studies reveal that, in developing countries, most of the private schools are not fully aware from the benefits of PTM. Beside, where the evidence of PTM is seen in few instances, no standardized process is available to conduct an effective PTM process. Owing to long-term sustainability and reciprocate economic benefits, school management is desired to have a standardized PTM process for an effective all-round performance. Likewise, the parents have a lot of expectations from schools and they want to be treated in a mannered way in which their complaints are formally addressed from the school management. The authors formulated all three phases from start to end process. The proposed process is validated in four private schools and got satisfactory results in terms of increased parents’ participation and decreased number of complaints.

This process will facilitate school managers to deal with parents effectively, collect the data from PTM, analyze it and use for the continuous improvement. Implementation of this process will ensure better meeting environment for the parents as well as for the teachers. The study bridges between quality management tools and BPM approach to improve the state of art of BPM practices that will lead to generate a trend of application of quality tools and management theories in private schooling industry.

The authors first time used BPM life-cycle approach to manage the process of PTM in private schools. The authors design a process to match the working of schools and the application of desired quality tools.