’Courting business’: the rhetoric and practices of school‐business partnerships

Abstract

This paper explores an increasingly popular form of business involvement in public education in industrialized countries ‐ school ‐ business partnerships. Beginning from the articulation of such partnerships by the OECD, the Conference Board of Canada and the Alberta government, the paper goes on to present a case analysis of the partnership between a large corporation and a secondary school in Calgary, Alberta. This shift from ‘macro’ to ‘micro’ levels contextualizes political discourse around partnerships and allows us to see where this discourse is adopted by local proponents, but at the same time where it is challenged by certain groups of employees, students and teachers. Such challenges problematize these relationships and raise issues around who is involved in planning partnerships, contradictions within and between the motives of proponents, and the relationship between such corporate involvement and government educational reform.