"Myth, Reality, and Reform bridges these critiques by balancing the importance of the four key functions of higher education: academic leadership, professional development, technological training and development, and general higher education. The book suggests how to consolidate the strengths of higher education systems while fundamentally reforming their weaker features.

In The School Reform Landscape: Fear, Mythologies, and Lies, the authors take an in-depth and controversial look at school reform since the launch of Sputnik. They scrutinize school reform events, proposals, and policies from the last 60 years through the lens of critical social theory and examine the ongoing tensions between the need to keep a vibrant unitary system of public education and the ongoing assault by corporate and elite interests in creating a dual system. Some of events, proposals, and policies critiqued include the Sputnik myth, A Nation At Risk, No Child Left Behind, the lies of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, and other common reform schemes. The authors provide an evidence-based contrarian view of the free-market reform ideas and pierce the veil of the new reform policies to find that they are built not upon empirical evidence, but instead rest solidly on foundations of myth, fear, and lies. Ideas for a new set of reform policies, based on empirical evidence and supportive of a unitary, democratic system of education are presented.

Challenges the commonly held myths about Zimbabwe's land reform.

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.

The first book to address the fundamental nexus that binds poverty and income inequality to soaring health care utilization and spending, Poverty and the Myths of Health Care Reform is a must-read for medical professionals, public health scholars, politicians, and anyone concerned with the heavy burden of inequality on the health of Americans.

In his latest educational exposé, internationally acclaimed author and scholar, Professor David Hopkins, places established and emerging ideas about effective school and system improvement under scrutiny. Exploding the Myths of School Reform confronts real-world challenges and perspectives from research, policy and practice, and draws on international benchmarking studies to support its objectives and claims. With each of ten chapters addressing a perceptible fallacy - such as the myths that poverty determines performance, that achievement cannot be realised at scale, that innovation and networking always add value and that it is curriculum rather than learning that counts - this groundbreaking manifesto is set to provoke and persuade. Through its carefully structured narrative highlighting areas of universal concern, the book presents a compelling approach to school reform, designed to enhance not only academic performance, but also the potential for students to learn. Teachers, school leaders, directors, policy makers and researchers—educationalists from across the board—will find the instructive frameworks and 'codas' for systemic change at all levels disarmingly simple to understand and apply. The same values and strategies that uphold social equity are shown to also promote quality in teaching, strong system leadership, regional capacity building and whole school design. Replete with explanatory diagrams, Exploding the Myths of School Reform contributes with depth and precision to the contemporary debate about the direction of schools and school systems, the possibilities and issues most likely to be encountered by leaders today and tomorrow, and the means to instigate authentic and lasting reform.