The last few decades have been ones of complexity and contradiction. Long-term socio-economic restructuring has produced deep and growing wealth disparities, leveling great constraints on urban public schools that must confront the social and educational repercussions of chronic poverty. Long-standing political austerity, coupled with fallout from the great recession, has rendered private/corporate sector solutions to public problems increasingly expedient. Corporations have aggressively encroached into the gaps in provisions to public education, addressing problems that hyper-concentrated wealth has helped to engender. This literature review examines ideological debates surrounding one aspect of this shifting landscape: corporate philanthropic partnerships in education. Exploring research from education and business, this article rethinks the underlying assumptions, motivations, and implications of two bodies of literature and wider discourses that take counter-related positions on the role of corporate social participation: (a) public-private partnerships (PPPs) as manna and (b) PPPs as privatizations in education.