School choice is a hot topic in the United States. Private school vouchers, public charter schools, open enrollment, and homeschooling all regularly appear on the policy agenda as ways to improve the educational experience and outcomes for students, parents, and the broader society. Pundits often make claims about the various ways in which parents select schools and thus customize their child’s education. What claims about school choice are grounded in actual evidence?This book pre...

This volume of essays examines the empirical evidence on school choice in different countries across Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It demonstrates the advantages which choice offers in different institutional contexts, whether it be Free Schools in the UK, voucher systems in Sweden or private-proprietor schools for low-income families in Liberia. Everywhere experience suggests that parents are ‘active choosers’: they make rational and considered decisions, drawi...

Canada, like other countries, is aging. The media has reported on a "grey tsunami," a demographic change reflecting longer life expectancy and the retirement of the so-called baby boomer generation. The numbers and percentages of older adults within our population continue to increase. In 2010, 15.3 percent of Canada's population was over 65; in 2030, it will be 24.1 percent. Many commentators have risen alarm about this flood of adults potentially bankrupting our health care system. This ...

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political ar...

Making policy is what governments do, but there are some fascinating and hotly debated issues associated with how government decisions get made in the interests of the people. The concept and practice of evidence-based policy-making insists that properly developed public policy draws on the best available evidence. This book considers how governments in Canada have historically interacted with research and what directions these interactions may take in the future. The goal of government maki...

Two of the most respected voices in education and a team of young education scholars identify 50 myths and lies that threaten America's public schools. With hard-hitting information and a touch of comic relief, Berliner, Glass, and their Associates separate fact from fiction in this comprehensive look at modern education reform. They explain how the mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain fro...

Contemporary social work cannot be understood without an appreciation of the broader context of social policy in which it takes place. Such an understanding is increasingly important as social workers are expected to work across institutional, professional and even national boundaries in new ways profoundly affected by the changing global context.This insightful book examines how shifts in the dominant political ideology have affected the nature of welfare provision, the kinds of s...

Compliance has become key to our contemporary markets, societies, and modes of governance across a variety of public and private domains. While this has stimulated a rich body of empirical and practical expertise on compliance, thus far, there has been no comprehensive understanding of what compliance is or how it influences various fields and sectors. The academic knowledge of compliance has remained siloed along different disciplinary domains, regulatory and legal spheres, and mechanisms...

We are confronted by neoliberalism and the inhumane consequences of its economic policies. The claim that "there is no alternative" to profit-making simply denies basic features of everyday reality. The Politics of Disability asks: Just where does all of this leave people with disabilities? What are their alternatives? They are among the most downtrodden people, frequently treated as losers for not trying hard enough. This meritocratic principle is antiquated and yet as a basic elem...

Despite remarkable economic advances in many societies during the latter half of the twentieth century, poverty remains a global issue of enduring concern. Poverty is present in some form in every society in the world, and has serious implications for everything from health and well-being to identity and behavior. Nevertheless, the study of poverty has remained disconnected across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in...

Universal healthcare, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Canada's public policy, is under fire, criticized for its heavy expense and questionable sustainability. In Where to From Here?: Keeping Medicare Sustainable, Stephen Duckett defends Canadian Medicare, addressing key concerns and refuting criticism, while also acknowledging flaws in the system and room for improvement.Duckett argues that while the fundamentals of Medicare are sound, a great deal of change is ...

Social Policy: Theory and practice is a fully revised, updated and extended edition of a bestselling social policy textbook, extensively reworked and adapted to meet the needs of its international readership. The book lays out the architecture of social policy as a field of study, binding the discussion of theory to the understanding of social policy in practice. It aims to provide students and practitioners with a sense of the scope, range and purpose of the subject while developing criti...