The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education

International Experience 23
of traditional adopt-a-school programs, in
which a private sector organization donates
money or makes other contributions (such
as volunteer staff time) but with no binding
agreement between the parties that gives
the private organization authority over key
aspects of school management.
Alternatively, schools can contract with
private organizations to provide a package
of services that may include, for example,
management training for principals, educational
materials, teacher training, and technology
services. In Brazil, public and private
schools subscribe to the Pitagoras Network,
and receive integrated advice on management
procedures and pedagogic methods
through yearly contracts for a cost equivalent
to the cost of buying a set textbooks for
every pupil (Rodriguez and Hovde 2002).
Aligning the three core pedagogical elements
(curriculum, teacher training, and
pedagogic techniques) with school management
is one of the strengths of Pitagoras’s
services towards quality improvement
(Rodriguez and Hovde 2002). Pakistan has
a similar program, Aga Khan Education
Services, which works with the Directorate
of Private Education to strengthen instructional
practices and management in lowcost
private schools (LaRocque 2008).
Many of the functions traditionally carried
out by local education authorities can
also be outsourced to the private sector.
The United Kingdom authorized the contracting
out of local authority functions in
2002 as part of a reform to introduce market
dynamics into the education system.
Local education authorities are responsible
for funding and managing state school services
for a local area (Hatcher 2006), but
private organizations are contracted by
the government to provide education services
if the local education authorities are
found to be failing in their performance or
if they voluntarily decide to outsource these
functions for efficiency reasons (LaRocque
2008). The United Kingdom’s legislation
envisions the new role of local education
authorities as brokers between schools and
private organizations as opposed to simple
service providers (Hatcher 2006). Services
such as pedagogic support, curriculum
advice, school improvement strategies,
information technology training, and ancillary
services can be outsourced, whereas
key services such as budget approval cannot.
There are an estimated 8,000 education
providers in the United Kingdom, and $789
million was spent on private sector consultants
in 2002–03 (Hatcher 2006).
Governments can contract with private
companies to provide academic support
for disadvantaged students. School districts
in the United States are required by
federal law to provide supplemental education
services both to schools that have not
made adequately yearly progress for three
consecutive years, and to schools with high
percentages of poor children (more than
40 percent) or students with special needs
(Burch, Steinberg, and Donovan 2007).
These supplemental services include afterschool
tutoring, remediation, and other
academic support activities that take place
outside regular school hours (United States
Department of Education 2007). As a result,
the number of students receiving supplemental
education services increased from
117,000 in 2004–05, to 430,000 in 2005–06
(General Accounting Office 2006), and the
supplemental services industry grew by an
average of 14 percent annually between
2000 and 2003 (Hentschke 2005). The program
requires private providers to offer
high-quality and research-based services,
and imposes few barriers to entering the
market (Burch, Steinberg, and Donovan
2007).
While theoretically, this U.S. initiative is
designed to encourage competition between
providers and increase the access of lowincome
students to high-quality academic
support, critics argue that larger firms have
so far been in a better position to acquire
greater market shares, hence undermining
competitiveness. Other criticisms that have
been voiced are that providers have few
incentives to serve special needs students
because of the high cost of providing this
kind of education (Burch, Steinberg, and
Donovan 2007), that it is too difficult to
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effectively IP : 192.86.100.35 (most evaluations are based on
school Mon, visits 30 Mar and 2009 12:16:23 self-reports rather than
performance indicators), and that providers
have to deal with complicated contracting
(c) The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank