Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities

“Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities is a brave and subtle exploration of the contradictions that haunt attempts to use public education reform as a strategy for holding affluent, highly educated families in revitalizing center cities. Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara shows how the relentless focus on marketing public schools undermines their democratic purposes and stratifies citizens, exacerbating divisions of class and race. Beautifully written and powerfully argued, this book demands close attention by everyone concerned with the fate of cities, schools, and democracy.”

“Even though inequality exists, policy makers have traditionally clung to the ideology that all children are equally valuable. Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara’s thoughtful, readable book shows how a popular reform aimed at keeping middle-class parents in the city ended up challenging this tenet of a democratic society. In their zeal to attract more middle-class families to the city, policy makers and educators adopted a stance where (white) middle-class families were seen as more valuable and more worthy than the existing working-class families. Cucchiara’s carefully done ethnographic research shows why the policy was seen as a good idea. It is the rare book that shows the processes through which inequality is sustained in daily life; extremely interesting and thought-provoking—highly recommended!”

“Often the critical discussion of the privatization and marketization of schools takes place on a very rhetorical and general level and does little to help us understand how, specifically, schools are becoming more like businesses or more heavily influenced by markets. Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara provides a very clear and compelling example of the involvement of private people and business in public education and of the ways in which market strategies have been at work here. She offers a major contribution that provides a good, detailed look at how ‘market mechanisms’ play out in practice.”