Neoliberal imaginary, school choice, and “new elites” in public secondary schools

ABSTRACT

There has been a growing concentration of high-achieving students attending selective public schools of choice as part of the neoliberal reforms of education. While this growth has had an eroding effect on the aim of inclusivity in public education, few have explored this development as a new segment of elite schooling. This paper fills this gap by drawing from an ethnographic study of school choice that focused on the phenomenology of students (ages 11–19) in the context of Vancouver, a major Canadian city. I argue that the practice of a select group of young learners choosing competitive public schools of choice contributes to our collective imagination and identification of these learners as distinctively smart and “gifted”. While building on Bourdieu's classic theory of cultural, economic, and social capital to analyse this phenomenon as a form of elite schooling, I highlight the importance of the neoliberal imaginary in how select youths come to embody the status of elites through the processes of competition, choice, and mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• School choice
• stratification
• elite education
• neoliberal imaginary

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Ee-Seul Yoon

Ee-Seul Yoon is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities of Research Council of Canada, her postdoctoral research explores socio-spatially the extent to which marginalized urban families exercise their access to school choice. She is also the recipient of the AERA Social Context of Education Division's Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2014 for her PhD research, which examined school choice from the perspective of young people. She has published in many journals including Children's Geographies, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Youth and Society. She is guest co-editor, with Dr Christopher Lubienski, of a forthcoming special issue of Educational Policy Analysis and Archives, titled “School Diversification and Dilemmas across Canada in an Era of Education Marketization and Neoliberalization”.