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Privatising public schools via product pipelines : Teach For Australia, policy networks and profit
Rowe, Emma Langman, Sarah Lubienski, Christopher
Rowe, Emma
Langman, Sarah
Lubienski, Christopher
Abstract
Drawing upon a long-term study of venture philanthropy and public schools in Australia, this paper focuses on Teach For Australia (TFA) as a major component of a venture philanthropic network, one that builds critical infrastructures and connections between non-government organisations and the state, creating a product pipeline into public schools. Utilising interviews with staff from Teach For Australia and venture philanthropic organisations, comprehensive and rigorous financial data, reviews, reports and website data, the analysis aims to identify the major philanthropic funders, individual actors and private foundations that leverage Teach For Australia, illustrating how this network develops for-profit pathways into public schools. In pushing a deficit framing of public schools, these networks incur privatisation effects, including flows of money, resources and key decision-making. They compromise the democratic principles upon which public schools are ideally based, in that the most disadvantaged public schools are opened up to ‘entrepreneurial’ and risk-taking corporate behaviour to test out teachers, products and services. By examining streams of revenue, partnerships and networks, we show how the purportedly non-profit Teach For Australia develops for-profit opportunities and business partnerships nested in corporate philanthropy, resulting in a privatisation effect on public schools.
Keywords
public schools, corporate philanthropy, network ethnography, philanthrocapitalism, governance, Teach For Australia
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
39
Issue
3
Page Range
384-409
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Education
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.