Corporate discourses in education

Different forms of privatization, some of them hidden, lead to the expansion of the market at the expense of society, but what has grown in education is far from a “free market.” Educational Management Organization (EMO) is the acronym coined by the investment community to name the for-profit, private companies that manage schools. Businesspeople and investors have viewed education as an open field in which to expand their opportunities. Due the strong support given to charter schools and to partnerships with business from both biggest political parties in the United States, the number of for-profit EMO and the number of states in which EMO are operating has increased over the past 10 years. The politics and policies of education in the United States constitute one of the bases for anticipating the school reform trends in Latin America.  The increase of educational corporate management in the United States marks a world trend, because corporate strategies originate in the “advanced” countries and subsequently are transferred to “developing countries”.

This study examines the websites of major EMO and associated texts, to analyze the way in which they represented themselves. The methodology is based on critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis  including some elements of what Foucault has termed genealogy. In this paper, I return to my first analysis on the topic, ten years later, asking: How do EMO’s design their images, build relations and attract consumers and, in turn shape what is understood and experienced as public education? Along the way, I reflect on the changes that have occurred in the websites, although a comparison across time is not the major focus.