Courting corporate sports partners in education

Abstract

This dissertation examines the nature of the longstanding cross-sector relationship between an urban public school district and a corporate-owned team franchise in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The study found that while this collaboration is often talked about as a partnership, in practice, it advances a corporate philanthropic and promotional relationship that is characterized by mutual affinities but not mutually agreed upon goals. This philanthropic connection to a powerful national sporting institution provides benefits to local public schools through incentives for perfect student attendance, motivational assemblies with professional athletes, and periodic, one-time donations in much needed technology. However, this relationship also raises key questions related to the mechanisms for social accountability in leadership decision-making, the effective and equitable use of school and corporate resources, and the indirect and inadvertent consequences when schools rely on commercialism and sports stardom to sell the meritocratic value of getting an education to a generation of students. The dissertation addresses the implications of the rise of corporate philanthropy within the context of economic austerity in public education. A multi-disciplinary review of research, drawing on four bodies of literature, considers the assumptions underlying counter-related discourses about corporate involvement in the public sector: 1) Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), 2) CSR as Greenwashing (i.e. disinformation disseminated by a firm to present misleading public images of corporate responsibility), 3) Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in education, and 4) PPPs as privatizations in education. The constant comparative method was used throughout to analyze multi-modal data from an ethnographic case study of one city's cross-sector collaboration with the NBA, including participant observations, review of news and media, and extended field interviews with thirty district leaders, school administrators, teachers, counselors, and coaches in three K-8 schools. The result is a critical examination of the confluence of altruism, elite professional sports, and the marketplace in urban public education.