For-profit pipelines into public schools in Australia: venture philanthropy and public education reform

• In Event: Privatizing education policy: exploring the role, networks and strategies of philanthropic actors to advance educational reform glocally (Part 2)

Proposal

In this presentation, I examine venture philanthropy in public education in Australia, pointing to private actors who have been influential in major policy reforms and agendas. As a highly privatized context, with one of the largest proportions of students enrolled in private fee-paying schools in comparison to other OECD countries, Australia potentially represents some distinctions to countries with higher levels of regulation. Conceptualizing privatization as heterogeneous rather than monolithic, and context-sensitive (Verger et al., 2017), Australia exemplifies a context with multiple and various forms of privatization, including out-sourcing and for-profit services. In this paper, I focus on the expansion of venture philanthropy in public education in particular, and the blurring of non-state with state actors (Shiroma, 2014).

Whilst venture philanthropy and the development of for-profit pipelines into public schools has arguably unfolded at a slower pace in comparison to the United States or England, many of the major reforms and agendas implemented in Australia demonstrate global policy borrowing (Lingard, 2010), in that they are influenced by venture philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation, policy intermediaries Education Endowment Foundation, or directly borrowed from Teach First UK or Teach For America.

Venture philanthropic-backed reforms and agendas have focused upon advancing the ‘what works’ agenda, including reforming initial teacher education (Skourdoumbis & Rowe, 2024), investing in education research and ‘knowledge brokers’ (Lubienski et al., 2011; Scott & Jabbar, 2014), and increasing for-profit providers in public education (Rowe et al., 2024). In this paper, I endeavor to trace and map a diverse network of non-state actors, as steered by the state, influential policy actors and specific reform agendas working in public education, to conceptualize evolving forms of privatization as aligned with philanthrocapitalism.

Author

• Emma Rowe, Deakin University