Beyond the Public-Private Nexus

Abstract

Increasingly, school-based partnerships have been tied to education reform and the entrance of private capital into the PK-12 space, most prominently from a philanthropy sector that contributes nearly $60 billion annually to education causes.  As a result, what may have been an at-will school-business partnership in the 1980s may today resemble an embedded multi-partner arrangement around professional development, teacher evaluation, or turnaround support. In this paper, a new framework is introduced to situate school-based collaborations in a contemporary context, notably acknowledging that schools today live in a new “blended capital” reality involving diverse sector influences, multiple sources of private and public funding, and therefore multiple measures of efficacy and accountability.