Elite Schools

Geography matters to elite schools — to how they function and flourish, to how they locate themselves and their Others. Like their privileged clientele they use geography as a resource to elevate themselves. They mark, and market, place. This collection, as a whole, reads elite schools through a spatial lens. It offers fresh lines of inquiry to the ‘new sociology of elite schools.’ Collectively the authors examine elite schools and systems in different parts of the world. They highlight the ways that these schools, and their clients, operate within diverse local, national, regional, and global contexts in order to shape their own and their clients’ privilege and prestige. The collection also points to the uses of the transnational as a resource via the International Baccalaureate, study tours, and the discourses of global citizenship. Building on research about social class, meritocracy, privilege, and power in education, it offers inventive critical lenses and insights particularly from the ‘Global South.’ As such it is an intervention in global power/knowledge geographies.

School choice is an increasingly important part of today’s educational landscape and this timely volume presents fresh research about the competitive admissions policies of choice systems. Based on their investigation of a unique civil rights challenge to school choice admissions policies in politically and racially divided Buffalo, New York, and the struggle to open its best schools to students of color, authors Orfield and Ayscue contend that without intentional effort, choice systems are likely to exacerbate problems of inequality and segregation. Focusing on issues that will continue to be contested in the courts and in the policy arena, the authors offer research-based recommendations for reducing barriers to enrollment and for creating competitive-admissions choice systems that will allow all students access to important educational opportunities. The book outlines specific steps school systems can take, including developing a district-wide diversity plan, providing more accessible information, conducting holistic admissions processes, expanding the availability of choices, and offering preparation programs to assist students long excluded from these highly competitive schools. Contributors: Natasha Amlani, Jongyeon Ee, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Jenna Tomasello, Brian Woodward “This important book ought to inspire a national debate. I hope it will be widely read.” —Jonathan Kozol, education activist and bestselling author In the News: Buffalo Parents Slam School Distric’s Response to Civil Rights Complaint: “This time around, parents with the District Parent Coordinating Council say that the proposal does not go far enough in addressing their complaints or the recommendations that Orfield proposed earlier this year.” —Excerpt from Education Week (10/1/15)

Education and Consecration of Neoliberal Elites: Introduction -- Business, Economics, and the Nobel Prize: History and Legacy -- Admission: Privilege, Values and Practices -- Consecration, Business Skills and Leadership: The Student Union -- Teaching Business: The Invisible Hand in Class -- Affinity: Pedagogics for a Future Elite -- Academic Freedom and the Business Community -- Business School Faculty and Neoliberal Thinking -- Lifelong Social Relationships and Networks: Business School Alumni -- Elitism and Masculinity: Business Schools and Elite Employers -- Business Schools and the Consecration of Elites: Conclusions.

Examining in detail the work of consecration carried out by elite education systems, Bourdieu analyzes the distinctive forms of power—political, intellectual, bureaucratic, and economic—by means of which contemporary societies are governed.

The Third Reich's Elite Schools tells the story of the Napolas, Nazi Germany's most prominent training academies for the future elite. This deeply researched study gives an in-depth account of everyday life at the schools, while also shedding fresh light on the political, social, and cultural history of the Nazi dictatorship.

Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances foregrounds the richly theoretical and empirically-based work of an international cast of scholars seeking to break out of the confines of the methodological nationalism that now governs so much of contemporary scholarship on schooling. Based on a 5-year extended global ethnography of elite schools in nine different countries—countries defined by colonial pasts linked to England—the contributors make a powerful case for the rethinking of elite schools and elite class formation theory in light of contemporary processes of globalization and transnational change. Prestigious, high-status schools have long been seen as critical institutional vehicles directly contributing to the societal processes of elite selection and reproduction. This book asserts that much has changed and that these schools can no longer rest on their past laurels and accomplishments. Instead they must re-cast their heritages and tradition in order to navigate the new globally competitive educational field enabling them to succeed in a world in which the globalization of educational markets, the global ambitions and imaginations of school youth, and the emergence of new powerful players peddling entrepreneurial models of curriculum and education, have placed contemporary schooling under tremendous pressure. This insightful and though-provoking volume provides a well-researched perspective on the nature of contemporary schooling in the globalizing era. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.

A Yale professor and author of A Jane Austen Education evaluates the consequences of high-pressure educational and parenting approaches that challenge the mind's ability to think critically and creatively, calling for strategic changes that can offer college students a self-directed sense of purpose.

This book provides a narrative account of the experiences of twenty former scholarship students from historically disadvantaged communities who attended elite public and private secondary schools. It draws on in-depth, one-on-one semi-structured interviews conducted with former scholarship recipients who were between the ages of 19 and 24 years at the time of the interviews. Various themes are explored, specifically focusing on elite schooling in relation to the experiences and navigational practices of the scholarship recipients and the adjustments that they felt they needed to make in order to fit into the elite school space.The book analyses and discusses the reflective experiences of students who were awarded a scholarship to attend an elite secondary school. It reveals that accepting the gift of a scholarship is far more complex, multi-layered, and at times harsh and even painful for the individual recipients than is possibly realized by those involved in this practice. This book contributes to academic educational debates within the sociology of education, elite schools and schooling in the post-apartheid South African context.