ABSTRACT. In his keynote address to the educational ideas and education policy special interest groups of the New Zealand Association for Research in Education, Michael Peters usefully identified three “notions” of partnership in education: (i) community governance; (ii) public private partnerships; and (iii) collaboration. On this typology, community governance may be essentialised as the practical enactment of social democratic idealism. It was most obviously manifested in the progressive sentiment that shaped the “universalist” funding and provision of New Zealand public education in the fifty years following the Great Depression of the 1930s. Public private partnerships today may be understood as merely the latest manifestation of a gradual state withdrawal from and the subsequent privatization of public education that was signaled in official policy texts from the early 1970s. Collaboration, here, is the visible (or public) social democratic networkers’ response to the largely invisible (or private) neoliberal networkers’ aggressive privatization of public education, an agenda that at present appears hegemonic in the OECD bloc. pp. 31–33