Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference

In April 2012, Justin van Fleet made three presentations at the annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The first presentation, entitled Engaging the Private Sector in the “Access plus Learning” Agenda, outlined why the global learning crisis has a direct impact on the business community, analyzed why little progress has been made by companies in supporting the Education for All agenda, and five principles for effective business engagement in the learning agenda. The five principles are explained in a new Brookings working paper.

The second presentation entitled, A new education agenda? Discourse shifts and the politics of post-2015, analyzed the discourse shifts in the education sector from access to quality and quality to learning. The presentation highlighted three policy windows for the discourse shift to learning to take hold and made predictions on the likelihood of a new sector paradigm.

The third presentation, A Disconnect Between Motivations and Education Needs: Why American corporate philanthropy alone will not educate the most marginalized, used a political economy lens to analyze the engagement of US companies in education in developing countries. The presentation, explored further in a book chapter authored by van Fleet in Public Private Partnerships in Education: New Actors and Modes of Governance in a Globalizing World, outlined the tensions between corporations and the government in the provision of education, the inherent contradictions in philanthropic practices, how philanthropic contributions legitimize business practices, and themes of dependency and inequality perpetuated by philanthropy.