The Role of the Philanthropic Sector in Shaping the Emerging Education Market: Lessons From the United States on Privatization of Schools and Education Governance

• In Event: The Global Education Industry: The Role of Corporations and Philanthropies in Setting Education Agendas

Abstract

With its fragmented education governance structures, the United States has been a prime site for the growth of corporate influence on education policymaking. While for-profit corporate interests have certainly taken advantage of these opportunities to advance their agendas, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways that “non-profit” corporate groups such as philanthropic foundations have led the way in restructuring education and in exerting greater authority over American schools.
Theoretically this analysis is informed by Harvey’s (2007) insights into the neoliberalism and the repositioning of the state, as well as Lipman’s (2011) framing of how, within neoliberalism, power is increasingly exerted through systems of governance occupied by for-profit and non-profit organizations. These theoretical considerations play an important part in understanding how non-profit, corporate-affiliated philanthropic organizations become influential in policymaking.
Methodologically the analysis done in this paper is guided broadly by critical policy analysis (Taylor, 1997), which interrogates how power and social relations are imbued and expressed through policy design and implementation. More specifically this paper relies on the data gathering and analysis techniques associated with social network analysis and network ethnography (e.g., Ball, 2012; Howard, 2002) to make sense of the relations that exist between corporate philanthropic organizations and the centers of power associated with policymaking and implementation.
Data regarding philanthropic funding was gathered from electronic databases associated with major corporate, philanthropic foundations (e.g., the Gates Foundation), as well as publicly available databases consisting of electoral campaign donations and 990 forms filed by non-profits with the U.S. federal government.
Our analysis moves from the case of charter school reform in Washington State outwards to the broader U.S. context. As such, we conclude that, within the context of neoliberalism, major corporate philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation have occupied powerful spaces once filled by democratically elected bodies, and they have used their financial influence to exert significant power over the direction of education policy in the U.S.
Our findings are significant because they suggest that organizations like the Gates Foundation are growing in influence in the global education reform movement, and this growth has significant implications for democratic access, both to schools, and to policymaking processes.

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Harvey, D. (2007). Neoliberalism as creative destruction. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610, 22–44.
Howard, P. N. (2002). Network ethnography and the hypermedia organization: New media, new organizations, new methods. New Media & Society, 4(4), 550–574.
Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, S. (1997). Critical policy analysis: Exploring contexts, texts, and consequences. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 18(1), 23–35.

Authors

• Wayne Au, University of Washington - Bothell

• Christopher A. Lubienski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign