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 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)…

The extent to which increasing students' ability to choose between schools can impact their educational outcomes continues to generate significant research interest. I take advantage of the unique context in the province of Ontario, where two publicly funded school systems operate in parallel. I find a small positive impact of school choice on…

The neoliberal turn in public education positions the parent as a consumer within an expanding educational marketplace. This shift is premised on the notion that the free market is best suited to promote equity. Critics of this claim highlight how a larger choice arena creates additional opportunities for privileged parents to mobilize their…

Using student achievement data from British Columbia, Canada, this study is an exploration of the differences that lie within the private school sector using hierarchical linear modeling to analyze the data. The analysis showed that when controlling for language, parents' level of educational attainment, and prior achievement, the private school…

Based on semi-structured interviews with high school teachers in Edmonton, Alberta, the reported study examined teachers' attitudes towards their roles and responsibilities in marketing their school, and the perceived impact of educational markets upon teachers' well-being. The teachers define marketing negatively and narrowly, resist any…

In this article, the authors discuss why ranking has become so popular in schools. Those who promote ranking believe that it provides information to help parents and students choose a "good school"; that it puts pressure on the underperforming school to improve; and that it provides an opportunity for a school to be scrutinized through a…