LluÃs Parcerisa and Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
"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 ... This book pushes us to think beyond the binary categories of public and private education..."
Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education, Indiana University.
"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 of 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."
Jessica Gerrard, University of Melbourne, Australia.
"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. The book... 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. "
Joel Windle, Monash University, Australia.
"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."
Lew Zipin, University of South Australia.
"I can testify to finding Rowe’s portrayals highly resonant. More than this, 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."