Conference Agenda

This presentation aims to explore how interventions by non-state actors are received, adopted, and ultimately enacted in public schools. Specifically, the paper presents an empirical study focused on the perceptions of school actors in public schools in Portugal regarding a digital education program promoted by a private foundation. According to previous literature, there has been a growing emphasis on the involvement of private political actors, such as philanthropists, think tanks, and edu-businesses, in education governance worldwide and in Portugal (Lubienski et al., 2022; Viseu & Carvalho, 2021). These actors have been active in using new strategies, including networking and knowledge brokerage to influence education policies (Avelar, 2021; Fontdevila et al., 2019; Viseu, 2022). However, the study of the actions and effects of private political actors within schools continues to be an underexplored field.

To address this gap, this study use “policy enactment” (Ball et al., 2012) as a starting point to capture the different positions of school actors in “doing school” (Maguire et al., 2015). With this theoretical approach, we seek to highlight the non-deterministic nature of interventions by private political actors in public schools, focusing on the different translations, interpretations, and recontextualizations by school actors.

To this end, the study focuses on the enactment by public Portuguese public schools to DigitALL program from the Vodafone Portugal Foundation. This program started in 2020 and so far evolved 7,000 students and 1,300 teachers. After applying for the program, the selected schools benefit from a comprehensive package that includes a digital platform, digital curriculum, student kits containing electronic circuits and motherboards, in-person teacher training, and weekly 50-minute classes guided by trained monitors. DigitALL program design confirms the argument of Spreen and Kamat (2018), in which non-state actors “are not only beginning to control curriculum content and testing in countries, they also make decisions about who teaches and under what conditions” (p. 111). The government, as a privileged ally of the new philanthropy, endorsed the institutional partnership established with the Vodafone Portugal Foundation, as the DigitALL program aims to develop digital and social skills; provides teacher training and “quality scientific and pedagogical digital educational resources” (Director of Directorate-General for Education available at Fundação Vodafone Portugal, 2022b).

In this scenario, we aim to contribute to discuss the interventions made by non-state actors in public schools as signs of privatization (Ball, 2007; Quilabert & Moschetti, 2022). Furthermore, we seek to identify how these initiatives align with an educational reform agenda that emphasizes performance policies, assessments, platformization and public-private partnerships (Verger et al., 2022; Williamson, 2019).

Corporate private foundations with vast financial resources are taking on an increasingly proactive and influential role in shaping educational aims, practices, and institutions around the world (Srivastava & Oh, 2010; Ball and Olmedo, 2011; Lubienski et al. 2022; Parreira de Amaral et al. 2019). While the concrete involvement of foundations reflects the historical specificities of different contexts, the increasing entanglement of private foundations in public education and state schooling has been interpreted as reflecting a broad shift in the work of foundations toward new forms of “hands-on” or “new” philanthropy in which foundations move from a contributory to a disruptive role (Horvath & Powell, 2016; Wilson, 2014). Framed in terms of educational governance and politics, this shift places major pressure on the conceptual and practical boundaries of conventional democratic control, delegations of responsibility, and framings of legitimacy.

The shifting grounds for articulating and enacting democratic control and legitimacy is especially salient in the context of European education and the region’s historical forms of welfare governance. While private foundations in the US and other contexts are, by now, an established (if controversial) part of educational governance, recent scholarship emerging across Europe points to important problematics regarding the effects of current philanthropic practices on the conventional divisions of power and democratic practices of accountability characteristic of European welfare states (Rasmussen, 2022; Avelar & Ball, 2019). Such effects pose a significant challenge to the notion of legitimacy as grounded in a chain of delegation, accountability, and trust, where voters authorize politicians to make decisions – on the priorities of public education, for example – and politicians then delegate the responsibility for implementing policies to civil servants (Strøm 2000). This is obviously different when it comes to private foundations: While foundations are legal actors attributed a status as charitable organizations by the political system, they do not themselves hold a role in the processes that make up the political system.

In this paper, we set out to explore empirical changes and reconfigurations of power and legitimacy in educational governance as corporate private foundations take on a proactive label of “change-makers” in public education. Situating our work within the historical context of the Danish welfare state, we set out to explore how legitimacy in public education is (re)constructed and altered through the practices of “new philanthropy” as a set of practices marked by increasing amounts of money, extended public-private partnerships, and new forms of educational knowledge production. We ask: How do corporate private foundations describe their responsibility for the change they aim at? And through what kind of practices are their investments in systematic change articulated and implemented?

In the paper, we respond to these questions through a case-based analyses focused on situating the practices of the two largest Danish foundations currently involved in the education sector: The Lego Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Drawing on theoretical approaches that can help approach reconfigurations of power and control in educational practices (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Brøgger, 2018; Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1977; Powell & Menendian, 2011), we are interested in extrapolating the broader historical and governmental dynamics at play in how foundations shape ideas of legitimacy by actively transgressing conventional governance arrangements and hierarchies. Theoretically, this includes perspectives that open to discuss the soft power of seduction and affectivity (Dernikos et al., 2020) as important factors when it comes to understanding new philanthropic practices. Through in-depth case analyses, the paper highlights the performative effects of enacting new philanthropy in relation to three interrelated practices: 1) new constructions of actors, 2) emerging forms of affective control, and 3) new forms of knowledge production.

This presentation focuses on the participation of new non-state actors in educational governance in Portugal, seeking a new analytical perspective: how these actors build their public image through the media. This focus stems from the interest in education policy studies in non-state actors over recent decades, recognizing their expanding role in reshaping education governance (Ball, 2012; 2016; Lubienski et al, 2022). These include firmly established global political actors such as the UN, OECD, UNESCO, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as well as governmental cooperation organizations, non-profit organizations, edu-businesses, think tanks and philanthropic foundations (Brent Edwards et al., 2021).
Think tanks and philanthropic foundations have received particular and growing attention from the academic community (Reckhow & Snyder, 2014). It is well-established that they have evolved into key players in educational policies, creating and producing new and relevant policy networks, acting as "policy actors" or "state-makers" (Lingard & Rawolle, 2011; Sellar & Lingard, 2014).
Previous research has illuminated the strategies employed by these actors for advocacy and policy influence, such as knowledge brokerage, networking and the creation of new policy networks, “problem-solving” and “leading by example” (Williamson & Hogan, 2020; Fontdevila, Verger & Avelar, 2021; Matovich & Esper, 2023). Following a long-established tradition in other countries, in recent years, Portugal has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of this phenomenon and think tanks and philanthropic foundations are acting as intermediary actors (Viseu & Carvalho, 2021; Carvalho & Viseu, 2023).
Simultaneously, studies on the media have focused on analyzing the thematization and framing that the media perform on education, demonstrating how a) the media attribute relevance to certain themes to the detriment of others, acting as instruments to simplify the complexity of the social world and narrow down the possibilities of how education is perceived and interpreted by the public (Santos, Carvalho & Melo, 2022); b) are used by state and non-state actors to manage expectations about public education, place certain educational policies on the agenda, or strengthen/undermine support for specific educational policies, practices, and ideologies. They also help define the boundaries of accountability and social responsibility for public education, shaping the field of educational policy (Blackmore & Thorpe, 2003; Anderson, 2007).
Studies have also revealed that the media produces a critical and negative portrayal of educational systems (Dixon et al., 2013), depicting them as damaged and in crisis. This has contributed to creating public outcry about their performance (Yemini and Gordon, 2015; Baroutsis & Lingard, 2023) and validating social distrust in public school educators (Baroutsis, 2016). In this regard, some studies reveal how the narratives constructed by the media about teachers contribute to the creation of an ideal type of teacher whose characteristics and attributes are highly valued by the private sector (Gautreaux & Delgado, 2016).
The relevance of the media as a political influence arena with significant effects is further demonstrated by studies that analyze the increasing presence of non-state actors in the media (Blach-Ørsten & Kristensen, 2016). However, studies examining how these non-state actors strategically use their presence in the media as a means of constructing their public image and, in turn, legitimizing their (positive) actions are still very scarce. Our work aims to contribute to filling this gap. Thus, this presentation aims to describe and analyze the image that non-state actors project about themselves and their interventions in the media, positioning as the political actors capable of contributing to solving the existing problems in schools and the “education crisis”.