In this article, we draw on various critical perspectives to theorize neoliberal choice and examine how it has been deployed to market new educational reforms in Ontario. We begin by offering a contemporary framing of neoliberalism that looks at its core elements as well as its chameleon-like tendencies to draw on neoconservative elements as…

Privatization of public education in North America has long been influenced by two schools of conservative thought: neoliberalism, which seeks to create a marketplace for public services in which individuals choose the option they judge to be in their best interests and government's role is limited as much as possible to simply funding these…

This article examines a popularized term, the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), and its underlying paradigm of neoliberalism. It elucidates neoliberalism's maddening effects on the education sector, especially public education. To analyze these effects, I draw from and adapt Michel Foucault's analytical approach to madness. My analysis…

Across Canada, school districts have been confronting a backlash to their equity and social justice initiatives. Critics of public education have been arguing that the solution to these controversies is to increase school choice. Using several examples from the United States, this paper argues that the endgame of these strategies is to undermine…

This paper uses Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the…

Post-secondary education (PSE) experienced explosive growth and diversification over the past century, affording students a range of increasingly complex pathways that they can travel to acquire a credential. In various jurisdictions, governments have made significant investments to facilitate student uptake of unconventional transfer pathways…

This paper examines the persistent, growing popularity of Canadian French immersion (FI) programmes. Critics charge that FI programmes are elitist, diverting already limited resources from other areas of the education system. We begin with a brief overview of the benefits of FI in Canada and enrolment trends. Next, sources of FI-related inequality…

In this paper, we present data from the most recent wave of the "Longitudinal Study of Young Jews Raised in Conservative Synagogues." Participants were part of the b'nai mitzvah class of 1994-1995 (or, the year 5755 in the Hebrew calendar) and members of Conservative synagogues in the US and Canada. Approximately 400 panel members took…

This study assesses the extent to which public high schools become more or less socially mixed after families are allowed to choose schools outside their designated catchment areas in a mid-sized Canadian city. We draw on settler-colonial theory, critical human geography, and critical social theory while applying a critical mapping of school…

This study uses a framework of transformative learning theory to explore fourteen participants' experiences with learning William Glasser's Choice Theory. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with students, staff and alumni of an alternative secondary school in order to explore their perspectives on the transformative potential of a…

Across OECD countries, education choice is proliferating as parents seek and governments permit choice both inside and outside public education systems. The movement of students out of the common public school, however, varies significantly across jurisdictions and sociodemographic characteristics such as race and class. This variation in…

In recent years, more and more Chinese students have come to Canada for their education. Some of them are parents, and they bring their children with them. Using a multiple case study design, this study explored these international parent-students in regards to how they select schools for their children. Six participants were recruited. Data were…

This article investigates whether parents in the United States and Canada send their children to schools that are similar to the schools they attended. Intergenerational continuity in the type of high school attended may be generated by social status or religious socialization concerns, or simply through familiarity, identity, and network ties…

Since the 1980s, education in Canada has been through a process that led to school choice, targeting the improvement of students' performance through school competition. These policies fostering an education quasi-market became an ideal framework for the expansion of IB schools. Since the Diploma Programme of the International Baccalaureate (IBDP)…

Little is known about the school choice practices of Aboriginal families in settler-colonial societies, where they have been removed from their ancestral lands and/or have been subjected to discriminatory educational policies. Through the lens of settler-colonial theory, this study elucidates the "spatially positioned" school choice…