Unpacking the legal and empirical ramifications of public private partnerships in education

• In Event: Realizing the Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education: Human Rights, Public Education, and the Role of Private Actors in Education

Proposal

Two chapters in this volume address the much espoused and contested phenomenon of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education. PPPs have long been promoted as an innovative and promising policy approach to address a variety of education challenges, including education access, equity, quality or economic efficiency. However, and despite PPPs’ growing popularity in different geographies, research on the issue is still relatively scarce, especially in the Global South, and often yields contradictory results. This limited understanding is further complicated by the neglect of contextual specificities and a failure to consider the heterogeneous nature of different partnership arrangements in education. Fredman, in her chapter, analyzes the legal standards at stake regarding the financing of private actors, while Verger, Moschetti and Fondevila review the literature on education PPPs from a political economy perspective.

Drawing on these two book chapters, this presentation seeks to compare the legal and empirical analysis of the implications of PPPs in education. Fredman argues that while the State must permit private education provision, the State is not required to fund it. However, the State is also not wholly prohibited from funding private education. Given that the state can fund private education, Fredman engages the question of under what conditions public funding of private schools is permissible based on the duty of the State to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to education. Drawing on different sources at the international, regional and municipal levels, she concludes that this is only possible under strict requirements and compliance with human rights law.

Verger, Moschetti, and Fontdevila address the question of how policy options moderate the effects of different types of PPPs in education, including vouchers, charter schools and subsidies, across several dimensions, with an overarching focus on learning outcomes and equity. They also analyze the effects of PPPs in relation to a series of key policy variables – including the scale and scope of the PPP (universal or targeted), the type of partnering institutions (for profit or non-for profit; independent providers or school chains), and regulations concerning student selection and tuition add-ons. The depth and rigor of their scoping review of 199 studies addresses the often “generic” PPP debate that “fails to adequately differentiate the extent to which PPP modalities work, for whom, and in which sense” (Verger et al., forthcoming). They find that PPP arrangements generally increase segregation and school segmentation and that learning/outcome gains, while present, are largely explained by student sorting and peer effects as opposed to instructional innovations. Given their global scale, these findings raise questions about how private actors interact with the equity-focused stipulations of the Abidjan Principles.

As complementary perspectives, the chapters by Fredman and Verger, Moschetti, and Fontdevila are a particularly crucial contribution to a politically sensitive debate, and help understand the legal reasoning behind the Abidjan Principles on education financing (Guiding Principles 64 to 73), which set very clear requirements for and limitations on the funding of private education institutions.

Author

• Mireille De Koning, Open Society Foundations