Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces

Emma Rowe's ambitious and insightful book masterfully explores and charts the new conceptions of public education as embedded in, or aligned with, the logic of markets. She pulls off an amazing feat of integrating global patterns with on-the-ground evidence, highlighting both the intellectual and social roots of this world-wide movement. The result is a remarkable analysis of the winners (and losers) in a new competitive and contested landscape of public schooling. Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy, Indiana University, USA. Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces brilliantly conveys the extent to which public education across the globe has become a site of struggle and contestation. We gain a rich and vivid sense of the contradictions and tensions that arise for the middle classes as they strive to juggle commitments to the public with private interests. At the centre of the book is a carefully considered and nuanced ethnography of middle class educational campaigning which provides a powerful springboard for a wide ranging and convincing analysis of class work within education that has worldwide significance. Diane Reay, Professor of Education, University of Cambridge, UK. Rowe presents an incisive and original account of how class and race traverse the dynamic political terrain of contemporary school reform. The monograph subjects policy and social movements across the globe to a sophisticated analysis, drawing expertly on rich institutional and ethnographic sources. An extremely useful contribution to public education scholarship. Joel Windle, Adjunct Senior Researcher, Monash University, Australia. This theoretically rich ethnography provides an important global perspective to studies of school choice and the marketization of education. Maia Cucchiara, Associate Professor of Urban Education Policy, Temple University, USA. ' Middle-class school choice in urban spaces offers rich and multifaceted analysis of the inscription of middle classness in public education, and creates the space to think more deeply about the ways in which public schooling is being transformed, and can be transformed. In this book, Rowe has struck a tension in the campaigns for and struggle over public education, and one that deserves further examination. It opens the space to consider more closely the contested struggles for public education, and the various standpoints and positions from which they emerge, whilst bringing attention to the effects of entrenched inequality within a marketised education system. Jessica Anne Gerrard, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Middle-class school choice in urban spaces is an essential piece of research to understand how market-driven policy principles are transforming not only education provision and the logics of action of schools, but also the rationalities, political actions and choices of new generations of citizen-consumers within the education marketplace. Overall, this book is crucial to understand the changing meaning of public schooling in post-welfare societies and in increasingly fragmented urban spaces. Rowe's work is an invitation to explore emerging dynamics of endogenous privatization and segmentation within public education systems worldwide, as well as to analyse how these dynamics are irremediably mediated by class, race and space. Lluis Parcerisa & Antoni Verger, reviewed in International Studies in Sociology of Education, 28:1, 81-83 Reading Middle-class school choice in urban spaces has broadened and deepened my lens for analysing power-relational dynamics and differentials across schools serving power-elite groups, power-marginalised groups, and 'middle' groups whose exquisitely tense activisms generate new hybrid forms of public school. I am sure this book will do likewise for many educational sociologists. Lew Ziplin, reviewed in International Studies in Sociology of Education, 28:1, 84-86