One of the most important books on both education policy, and governance, in recent years...The book moves beyond questions of educational spending to engage seriously with education systems as complex services, examining the politics of hiring, training, and structuring teacher professionalism. Schneider masterfully combines an analysis of how different constellations of electoral demand and teacher mobilization operate to shape varying modes of reform. The book draws on multiple rich and extremely well researched cases. The result is a book that provides original theorizing both of education policy and the dynamics governance and organizational dynamics under different structures of union mobilization and clientelist politics more generally.
Jane Gingrich, Oxford University