Over the last four decades, there has been a significant increase in public-private education partnerships (PPPs). However, rather than reflecting the traditional PPP model where the private sector contributes resources to fulfill public policy agendas, businesses and philanthropies are partnering with urban schools to pursue their goals for reforming public education policy. With billions of dollars being spent by organizations like Microsoft, Meta, the Broad Foundation, and Bloomberg philanthropies on major initiatives to reform public education through teacher training and core curricular Changes, there has been surprisingly little research on the public-private partnership model itself and its impact on education policy. This dissertation intends to address this research gap by considering how public-private partnerships have been traditionally defined and explained in public policy and political science; what has Changed in the structure and purpose of public-private partnerships in education; how do we define and understand an educational public-private partnership in the current context; how do we determine what makes public-private partnerships successful; and based on this new definition, how do we understand their impact on educational public policy priorities?
The dissertation aims to accomplish the following:
1) Discuss the existing public policy and political science literature on public-private partnerships.
2) Use anecdotal evidence, research literature, and news reporting to propose a framework for what public-private partnerships in education entail now and what their outcomes appear to be.
3) Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) of success from that literature and test their relevance to the success of current educational PPPs – towards formalizing a new theoretical definition and future guide for applied research.
4) Use both quantitative and qualitative research methods on a sample of partnerships which have already been documented either through original research or third party analytical and narrative reports to analyze and define those key performance indicators which are relevant to current educational PPPs.
5) Through analysis of the intended and actual outcomes of those PPP cases used in previous analysis, demonstrate how current educational PPPs are now both formulating and implementing policy. The importance of this finding is related to debates about the purpose of public education, the definition of public goods, and democratic accountability.
6) Identify the gap between the existing theoretical definition of PPPs and the derived newly proposed framework and the implications for theory, practice and policy.
7) Through a synthesis of the above items, construct an original method and tool for how to form and assess these partnerships for successful outcomes, as well as effective policy.
Applied Qualitative Research
The third paper utilizes data from the quantitative research of paper 2 and builds and expands on the findings by using a qualitative methodology to analyze cases which have a more robust narrative. The cases I consider are Bloomberg philanthropies Global Scholars and Mark Zuckerberg’s Newark public schools. I document the functional, political, and financial differences between the cases, as well as how the PPPs were implemented. This applied research considers the indicators which proved relevant in the prior quantitative research through a qualitative analysis of materials, reports, and interviews.
Applied Quantitative Research
This second paper is applied quantitative research and serves as the bridge between the literature and theory to current applications and directs the focus of the subsequent applied qualitative research in this dissertation. I take the elements identified as standard KPIs from literature and prior research studies and using the documentation from the united way portfolio I test the relevance of those existing KPIs to the current theoretical framework. The Detroit cases are ideal for this portion of the research as those cases were created as PPPs and concluded (at least as far as an initial MOU agreement) within a specific timeframe. I collected all the documentation on those partnerships and their elements using a measurement system I developed. I use a quantitative method of binary logic regression to consider, given the documented outcomes of those cases, whether there is simple significance of an indicator as it relates to a quantitative definition of success. My metric is whether more than 50% of the objectives outlined in the MOUs were successfully completed.
The quantitative methodology is important, because it allows us to determine which indicators remain relevant and warrant further study. At the end of this paper the advantages and limitations of quantitative analysis will be discussed, as well as thoughts about how qualitative analysis may help further the research going forward. This serves as a bridge to the next section/chapter.
The purpose of this paper is to move beyond simply identifying components of the PPPs, as was done in the second paper, to more fully articulate and define them. I also identify the variance in PPP outcomes which may come from leadership structure, organizational occupation (for profit, nonprofit, public) and other operational and political variables. This section draws heavily on my research which uses a qualitative comparative frame to analyze the BP and Zuckerberg cases. The importance of these findings, as well as the advantages and limitations of this methodology are also be discussed.
Toward a Theoretical Framework for PPPs & a New Tool for Evaluation Research The third paper of the dissertation synthesizes the analysis from the previous two papers in order to integrate both sets of findings and limitations in order to better define and understand current educational PPPs. This will lead to a new proposed theory of PPPs in education, to be followed by an analytic discussion, which will rely on research I have already done. The new proposed theory will be compared to the existing theory. The empirical evidence will make clear that new forms of PPPs have been implemented that are not accounted for in the existing theory. The implications of these findings will be important for both public and private actors who will need to think about and formulate PPPs in different ways than they have been doing.
Once this is explicated, I consider the implications of substituting PPPs for the traditional policymaking process, and what can reasonably be anticipated as outcomes for public goods and democratic accountability. PPPs must be understood as an alternative pathway to policymaking which most often will not include traditional policy makers, and by virtue of financial and operational conditions, will fast track educational reforms. This increase in speed and coherence of reform is likely to be accompanied by a decline in democratic accountability, which particularly as it concerns public K-12 education, may fundamentally change the nature of that specific public good, and may even extend to a larger reconceptualization in the country of the concept of public goods.
The last section of the third paper moves from the theoretical to the applied. This section discusses how the research gathered and synthesized in the previous two papers contributes to an applied framework for formulating and assessing educational PPPs for rates of success. This is especially important as we can expect that there will not be a decline in educational PPPs, but rather an ever-growing prevalence of them in American public education systems.
I then make the case specifically for the use of comparative-qualitative analysis as an appropriate analytic frame for an evaluation tool. The section then goes on to detail the development of this tool, which relies on the methods and findings of the previous applied research sections in the dissertation. I provide a methodology for documenting the qualitative elements to be observed through an interview protocol, as well as the methodology by which that qualitative data can be converted to a quantitative value using previously discussed key variables and then cross-assessed with other related variables, weighted, and inputted into a prescribed algorithm (using analytics frames from educational performance evaluations, quantitative regression, and machine learning prediction principles). This will produce a predictive outcome of success and a meta frame to compare and contrast different educational PPPs going forward.
This aspect of the research is important, as it provides practitioners, educators, policymakers, and public and private leadership a better understanding of what in fact they are doing when attempting to formulate and implement a public private partnership; what elements they should seek to build into their partnership in order to create increased conditions for successful outcomes; and finally how as researchers, we might, in the future, have a tool to observe, track, and evaluate these partnerships to further our theoretical and applied understanding of educational policy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/vph1-4333 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | MacQuarrie-Tomey, Ashley |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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