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Beyond "Brokering": Intermediary Organizations and the Construction of Policy Knowledges

Mon, April 16, 8:15 to 9:45am, New York Marriott Marquis, Floor: Fifth Floor, Booth

Abstract

This ethnographic case study investigates the mechanisms through which one intermediary organization (IO), InnovateEdu, influences educational policies and politics. I illustrate how InnovateEdu does not merely “broker” information and resources between state and market sectors as scholars suggest. I argue that InnovateEdu brokers resources and participates in the construction of “definitions of what counts as education” (Ball, 1990, p. 3). InnovateEdu animates discourses of a digital meritocracy and promotes educational technologies that intensify an individual focus on students, while excluding attention to structural inequities. At stake in this analysis is an understanding of IOs as producers of policy knowledges, which channel reform energies and resources toward policy alternatives unlikely to advance lasting and equitable school change.

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