ABSTRACT
This chapter provides background on the pattern of change in the governance of education globally and in China. It outlines the trajectory of public school reform in Anglo-American countries (United States, United Kingdom and Australia) and China in three time periods, namely establishing public schools, governance through bureaucracy and governance through markets. This chapter explores how states involve education in processes of governing through different “modes of coordination” (Thompson et al., 1991, p. 22). This mode of coordination serves as a mapping device in this chapter. Chinese education shares some similarities with the mode of governance in Western countries in the?sense that the state was once central but now there is a shift from hierarchy to market. However, the trajectory is different to that of the West’s, because Chinese society has undergone tumultuous changes in its socio-economic, political and cultural realms (Tsang, 2000).
