The challenge of corporate elites and public education

This chapter sets out to summarise the key messages and trends in the research reported in the essays in this book. We take forward the idea of corporatised governance, where we examine what the data and analysis has to say about the privatisation of public service education, and the particular contribution of corporate elites. Specifically we identify the movement of educational issues from the public to private domains; the relocation of public education issues from government institutions to particular private organisations and individuals; and the redesign of the meaning and conduct of professional practices, and teaching and learning. We examine what public education means, and how research has a role in making the case.

Political and corporate elites and localised educational policy-making: the case of Kingswood Academy

This chapter reports on data and analysis to theorise the role that both corporate and political elites played in the development and enactment of localised policy-making at Kingswood Academy; a secondary school in the North of England. The analysis offered reveals how a single case-study school provides an important site to explore the ways in which the educational policy environment provides the conditions for elites to play a significant role in the development and delivery of localised policy processes in England. Bourdieu (1986; 1992) provides the thinking tools to undertake this theoretical and intellectual work, and I deploy his conceptualisation of misrecognition as a means of interrogating how the involvement of corporate and political elites in the processes of localised policy-making reproduces the hierarchised power of particular networks, which ultimately contribute to the privatisation of educational ‘goods’ as marketised commodities.

Axis of advantage: elites in higher education

The intention in this chapter is to offer a critical commentary on ways in which the educational marketplace works to the advantage of elite universities. It is these institutions that use their histories and traditions, image and reputation, to further preserve and reproduce their privilege, position and power. This is labelled as the axis of advantage. Elite institutions are well recognised and accrue esteem based on those who work or have worked there, those who study there or who have studied there, and by the philanthropic bequests received. This chapter argues that this roll call of individuals, alumni, benefactors and networks linked further disconnects elite institutions with the ordinary and the everyday.

Fighting for the local: Americans for Prosperity and the struggle for school boards

Corporate-backed philanthropic groups have become increasingly involved in political processes in the past ten years. The Koch Brothers’ and their political advocacy groups, have become particularly prominent players. Their influence extends beyond high-profile state-level elections and increasingly have begun investing in municipal affairs of small cities and towns, such as school board elections like Kenosha, Wisconsin and Jefferson County, Colorado in the US. This chapter asks, why do groups like Americans for Prosperity care about small-town school board elections? This chapter highlights two particularly significant local examples in the United States: school board elections in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2014 and Jefferson County, Colorado in 2015. Through documentary analysis of school board records, news reports, and district evaluations, in both Wisconsin and Colorado, we chronicle the political contest for control of each school board. Our findings illustrate the ideological and political project of corporate, conservative influence in public education in the United States.

Scoping corporate elites and public education

This book reports on primary research into the role and influence of corporate elites in regard to the reform of public education. This introductory chapter outlines this purpose, with a focus on corporatised governance. We outline the trends in reform, and the role of elites and corporate elites in particular, and we then provide an over view of the book and the main contributions of the reported research.

Fast-track leadership development programmes: the new micro-philanthropy of future elites

The chapter contributes to discussions on public sector fast-track leadership schemes as an elite re-professionalising project that occurs within and across different domains of the public sector. An aim of Teach First is to create a ‘movement of leaders’ to end educational inequality through societal change. The chapter explores the path of one Teach First ambassador as he developed an equivalent fast-track scheme in social work called Frontline. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be approach, the chapter explores how entry routes into the teaching profession are being transformed into processes for encouraging the emergence of individuals who are able to successfully develop initiatives that mobilise representations of complex social problems in line with elite and neoliberalising social imaginaries. In particular the discourses and practices of transformational leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation functioned to individualise and individuate explanations, representations and responses to complex social problems.

The courtier’s empire: a case study of providers and provision

In this chapter, I draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence, social capital and misrecognition to theorise three effects of a few elite multi-academy trust principals’ positioning on other local headteachers’ and principals’ agency and identities — I typologise these as the “follower”, the “acquired” and the “excluded”. The chapter reports on primary research which shows how newly privileged system-leading principals, or courtiers at the court of the Secretary of State for Education, have won regional empires through expanding their academy chains to occupy the spaces opened up by the dismantling of local authorities. Public-sector and school-leader identities and histories permit the promotion of their activities as “school led” and downplay their close relationship with private-sector networks and central-state policy-makers. What this analysis reveals is the hierarchisation of school leadership and the illusion of headteacher or principal autonomy.

(Re)producing elites: meritocracy, the state and the politics of the curriculum in Singapore

This chapter first examines how the logic of meritocracy in Singapore vacillates between its elitist and egalitarian dimensions. Drawing upon ethnographic data from an elite and a mainstream school, it then develops an analysis of how one specific area of the curriculum – critical thinking – embodies this tension, specifying distinct knowledges and competencies for different students. The chapter argues that even as critical thinking is taught to all students, what often remains obfuscated are the ways through which the ideology of meritocracy acts to selectively recontextualize both the form and content of the subject in the process of its transmission.

Corporate consultancy practices in education services in England

This chapter reports on primary research into the experience of education professionals who are located at the interface of the privatisation of public education in England. Specifically data are provided from “dispossessed experts” who have moved into private consultancy through the push of redundancy from the public system and/or the pull of business freedoms as a rejection of public bureaucracy. I examine what it means to be located within a ‘conjunctural crisis’ through using the thinking tools of hysteresis, mimicry and misrecognition in order to examine the influence of corporate elites. Such influences impact on how individuals reposition at a time of major changes to identity and working lives (and livelihoods), where the neoliberal project is lived, revised and constructed through ordinary decisions and practices.

Double standards: everyday corporate strategies at an elite school in Argentina

This chapter explores the way that a private “English” school in Argentina negotiates curriculum demands at the global and national level. On the one hand, its International Baccalaureate programme positions the school within an educational frame that has cache locally and globally. On the other, the school also offers the state-based syllabus in an innovative fashion that involves some “curriculum chicanery” from the administration. Juggling these demands is best suited to a school with the corporate nous and wherewithal to manage them. Consequently, the school’s everyday practices strategically support an elite clientele that demands a valuable and exchangeable commodity: namely, private education that outstrips its public equivalent.