How and why policy design matters: understanding the diverging effects of public-private partnerships in education

ABSTRACT

Despite Public-Private Partnerships’ (PPPs) growing popularity within education policy circles, research on their effects yields contradictory results. The understanding of PPP effects is limited by the prevalence of generalist analyses that neglect to acknowledge the exceptional heterogeneity of the policy frameworks in which PPPs crystallize. Building on a scoping literature review, this paper aims at identifying patterns of effects of main PPP modalities on education (namely vouchers, charter schools and public subsidies for private schools) by considering the mediating role of policy-design variables. Our results show that PPP configurations oriented at the generation of market-like dynamics are frequently found to exacerbate school segregation and educational inequalities. Conversely, those PPP arrangements less conducive to market competition and those that follow an affirmative action rationale (such as targeted vouchers) are more likely to yield more positive effects on learning outcomes than other types of PPPs, without necessarily undermining equity.

KEYWORDS:

• education policy
• public-private partnerships
• vouchers
• charter schools
• education privatisation
• subsidies
• scoping literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Antoni Verger is associate professor at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). His research examines the relationship between globalization, governance institutions and education policy – i.e. how education policies are internationally disseminated and enacted in different institutional settings, and how this impacts education quality and equity. Currently, he coordinates the ERC-funded project “Reforming Schools Globally: A Multiscalar Analysis of Autonomy and Accountability Policies in the Education Sector”.

Mauro C. Moschetti is a full-time Associate Researcher at the Department of Pedagogy at the University of Girona, and a Senior Researcher at the Department of Sociology of UAB. His research is concerned with public-private partnerships and market policies in education, educational inequalities and the evaluation of educational policies from an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of comparative education, sociology of education and global studies.

Clara Fontdevila is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology of UAB, with a thesis focusing on the negotiation of the SDG4 global education agenda and the development of associated global learning metrics. Over the years, she has collaborated with various educational and research organisations, including Education International, UNESCO and the Open Societies Foundation. Her areas of interest are education markets, the global governance of education, and the global governance of education.

Notes

1 For the purposes of this study, English academies fall under the charter school category.

2 Although behavioural problems, learning disabilities or other educational difficulties might be considered as well (Levin 2002).

3 It should be noted that those systems in which student selection and profit-making are not explicitly prohibited have been classified as facilitative of those practices because such dynamics unfold precisely because of deregulation, the absence of an explicit prohibition or the existence of legal vacuums and blind spots.

4 The prevalence of selection practices is ultimately dependent on the nature of school choice and school admissions arrangements. We reflect on the importance of such variables in the Discussion and the Conclusion sections of this paper.

5 The fact that our analysis merges system-level, school-level and student-level gains in learning achievement into a single category does not allow us to perform a more fine-grained analysis.