Neoliberal imaginary, school choice, and "new elites" in public secondary schools

There has been a growing concentration of high-achieving students attending selective public schools of choice as part of the neoliberal reforms of education. While this growth has had an eroding effect on the aim of inclusivity in public education, few have explored this development as a new segment of elite schooling. This paper fills this gap by drawing from an ethnographic study of school choice that focused on the phenomenology of students (ages 11-19) in the context of Vancouver, a major Canadian city. I argue that the practice of a select group of young learners choosing competitive public schools of choice contributes to our collective imagination and identification of these learners as distinctively smart and gifted. While building on Bourdieu's classic theory of cultural, economic, and social capital to analyse this phenomenon as a form of elite schooling, I highlight the importance of the neoliberal imaginary in how select youths come to embody the status of elites through the processes of competition, choice, and mobility.