While powerful private actors have long played an influential role in public education in the United States, there is significant urgency in the current moment given the centrality of private actors in educational policymaking. I argue that private actors—philanthropic and corporate actors, in particular—are plutocratic where they accumulate political power and access to decision-making spaces within public education as a result of their wealth. This power culminates in the circulation of their ideas about the political purposes of schooling that may come at the expense of other educational visions. I theorize the problems posed by plutocratic actors engaged with public education. First, that through plutocratic action, wealthy actors exert their vision of education without public accountability, and second, that wealthy actors may derive disproportionate benefits from a narrowed vision of education. I typologize and evaluate the ecosystem of private actors engaged with public education, and the mechanisms of influence deployed by these actors historically and contemporarily that generate institutional isomorphism across the organizational field of public education. I diagram normative ideas about the political purposes of public education. I contend the contemporary emphasis on career readiness results from a persistent public-private schooling for work institutional order and is the outcome of coalitional political projects that instrumentally position schools to serve private and state economic imperatives. Drawing on approaches from American Political Development, I trace key legislative moments in the federal expansion of formal vocational education policy through the schooling for work order. This analysis draws on policy documents, the Congressional Record, executive reports, and U.S. Code Revisions from the passage of the Smith Hughes Act of 1917 through present to trace federal efforts in vocationalizing public education. Finally, I develop the case of President Obama’s Computer Science for All initiative and subsequent philanthropically supported efforts to expand computer science education across all levels of public education. This dissertation advances a conceptual understanding of power and influence in the educational policy construction process and reveals an influential political coalition that invests in and advocates for particular education reforms through private power.