Transnational accreditation for public schools: IB, PISA and other public–private partnerships

ABSTRACT

This article examines a particular type of public–private partnership (PPP) that is rarely studied in comparative educational policy studies: one in which a government funds privately run international schools. The aim of this PPP is to enrich and thereby improve the regular curriculum or to the quality of education in public schools. As the exponential growth of International Baccalaureate (IB) illustrates, such forms of PPP have increased significantly over the past few years. The authors show that transnational accreditation holds a special appeal for the middle class that is committed to cosmopolitanism, international mobility, and global citizenship. However, international standards schools such as IB are not alone with advancing a transnational accreditation of their educational programmes. Symbolically, Programme in International Student Assessment also provides a transnational accreditation, albeit not on individual education programmes but rather on entire educational systems. The article examines the reasons for the popularity of this type of PPP, analyses the interaction between the private and public education sectors, and investigates how governments explain, and what they expect from, the close cooperation with private education providers.

KEYWORDS:

• Public–private partnerships
• comparative policy studies
• international schools
• PISA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In 2018, in supplement to its annual membership fee ($ 11,650), an IB school in the United States pays a registration fee per candidate ($ 172) plus an assessment fee per subject ($ 119) (see IBO, 2018b, 2018c).

2. MCA is a statistical method of data analysis that makes comparison possible where it is otherwise difficult, assembling schools that share the same characteristics and distancing those that do not. It thus provides a geometric representation summarizing relations between large numbers of categorized variables. Originating in France in the 1960s, it was notably used by Bourdieu in Distinction (1979) as empirical grounding for field theory, i.e. for constructing multidimensional social spaces, see Duval (2016) and Le Roux and Rouanet (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gita Steiner-Khamsi

Gita Steiner-Khamsi is Professor of Comparative and International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York (fall semesters), and at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (spring semesters). She is Director of NORRAG, co-editor of three book series (Teachers College Press, Routledge, E. Elgar) and published widely on comparative policy studies, policy borrowing, and globalization in education.

Leonora Dugonjić-Rodwin

Leonora Dugonjić-Rodwin holds a Joint PhD in Sociology and Education (2014) from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) Paris and the University of Geneva. She is currently Visiting Fellow at the Department of History of Humboldt-University in Berlin/Germany. Her areas of research are International Baccalaureate schools, history and sociology of education, internationalism in education, international circulation of ideas.