Mapping Corporate Education Reform by Wayne Au

Mapping Corporate Education Reform by Wayne Au

Mapping Corporate Education Reform outlines and analyzes the complex relationships between policy actors that define education reform within the current, neoliberal context. Using social network analysis and powerful data visualization tools, the authors identify the problematic roots of these relationships and describe their effects both in the U.S. and abroad. Through a series of case studies, each chapter reveals how powerful actors, from billionaire philanthropists to multinational education corporations, leverage their resources to implement free market mechanisms within public education.

By comprehensively connecting the dots of neoliberal education reforms, the authors reveal not only the details of the reforms themselves, but the relationships that enable actors to amass troubling degrees of political power through network governance. A critical analysis of the actors and interests behind education policies, Mapping Corporate Education Reform uncovers the frequently obscured operations of educational governance and offers key insights into education reform at the present moment.

Wayne Au and Joseph Ferrare’s collection charts the upward redistribution of money, influence, data and governance from public education into private [white] hands, with brilliant, multi-site network analysesA "must read" for pre-service and contemporary educators, parents, organizers and school board members who are being recruited into reform efforts, this book reveals the slow violence of privatization, displaying the hollowing carcasses of public institutions and documenting the profoundly uneven collateral consequences.

Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology and Urban Education, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Mapping Corporate Education Reform is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the neoliberal state’s shift from government to governance has transferred democratic control of public education to corporate interests. This book’s rich case studies concretely map the networks of powerful individuals and organizations that are now making key education policy decisions in favor of education markets, as well as the broader neoliberal restructuring of public education around the world.

Pauline Lipman, Professor of Educational Policy Studies, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago

Wayne Au is Associate Professor at the University of Washington—Bothell, and is an editor for the teaching magazine and non-profit publishing house Rethinking Schools.

Joseph J. Ferrare is Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky.