Uppsatsen syftar till att studera hur gymnasieskolor profilerar sig genom marknadsföring. Detta tillämpas genom en diskursanalytisk studie av sex gymnasieskolor, som alla tillgodoser det Samhällsvetenskapliga programmet, belägna i Uppsala kommun. Av den marknadsföring som funnits tillgänglig har urvalet begränsats till respektive skolas hemsida. Resultatet visar på ett samband mellan hur skolorna talar om utbildning och elev. Det centrala för detta samband är hur eleven, genom skolornas marknadsföring, konstrueras som en konsument av utbildning. I denna konstruktion av utbildningsalternativ framträder olika profileringskategorier som skolorna tyr sig till genom marknadsföring. Den gemensamma profileringskategorin är den marknadsorienterade som visar hur skolorna presenterar sitt utbildningsalternativ genom att negativt särskilja sig från konkurrerande skolor. I detta finns en förskjutning från information om utbildning till marknadsföring av utbildning. I sin tur innebär detta att den information eleven tar del av inför sitt gymnasieval, också innehåller inslag av erbjudanden och reklam. I och med att eleven konstrueras som konsument har det skapats en kunskaps- och maktrelation mellan elev och skola. Denna relation konstruerar sedermera en situation där skolorna är beroende av att marknadsorientera sig för att utmärka sig i konkurrenssituationen som uppstått av det fria skolvalet. / The essay aims to study how secondary schools are profiled by marketing. This is applied through a discourse analytic study of six secondary schools, all of which meet the Social Science program, located in Uppsala. Of the marketing that has been available, the selection is limited to each school's website. The results show a correlation between how schools are talking about education and students. The key to this correlation is that the student through the schools marketing is designed as a consumer of education. This construction of educational options shows different profiling categories that schools cling to through marketing. The common profiling category is the market orientated that shows how schools will present their educational options by negative differentiate itself from rival schools. This is a shift from information on education for the promotion of education. In turn, this means that the information students take part in before secondary school also contains elements of promotions and advertising. As the student is constructed as a consumer, a knowledge and power relationship between student and school has been created. This knowledge and power relations construct later a situation where schools are dependent on market orientation to excel in the competitive environment created by the free school choice.

Huvudsyftet med denna studie är att kartlägga vilka faktorer som påverkar i gymnasievalet. Frågeställningar som belyses är vilka faktorer som påverkar eleverna och vilka personer som är betydelsefulla. I studien diskuteras också skillnader mellan olika grupper som exempelvis kön. Metoden som valdes var enkätundersökning med elever i årskurs 9 som stod inför sitt gymnasieval. Resultatet visar att intresse och att programmet ska förbereda för högre studier är de faktorer som påverkar mest. Betydelsefulla personer är framförallt eleven själv, men också vårdnadshavare. Som teoretisk utgångspunkt har Pierre Bourdieus begreppsram använts. Resultatet visar att vårdnadshavarnas utbildningsnivå har en direkt påverkan på elevens meritvärde vilket i sin tur påverkar valet mot ett bredare program med inriktning mot teoretiska ämnen. Det finns ett samband mellan vilket intresse som utvecklas och elevens habitus. Vårdnadshavarnas informationskapital och skolkapital påverkar också elevens val av program. / The main objective of this study is to identify factors that affect the high school choice. The research questions highlights factors that affect students and which persons were significant. The study also discusses the differences between various groups such as sex. The chosen method was a questionnaire survey of students in grade 9 who were facing their election. The results showed that interest and the program to prepare for higher studies was the factors that impacted the most. Important people were mainly pupils themselves, but also parents. As a theoretical point, Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual framework has been used. The results shown that parents education has a direct impact on the student's merit rating, which affects the choice of a broader program focusing on academic subjects. There is a relationship between the interest which is being developed and the student's habitus. Parents' information capital and school capital also affects the student's choice of programs.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2003. / Title from title page screen, viewed Aug. 13, 2004. Dissertation Committee: Rodney P. Riegle, Barbara S. Heyl (co-chairs), Mary Anne Moffitt, Amee Adkins, Will Ashton. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-116) and abstract. Also available in print.

All states have different perspectives and various statutes within broader constitutional law. Perception of public dissatisfaction with public schools has led to choice schooling options for parents. One of the fastest growing choice options in schooling is charter schools; schools privately run by organizations through public funds. This study analyzes the governance of charter schools and how charters operate under legal guidelines and Florida statutes, with significant legislative events cited. This study answers the following questions as they relate to evolution and legal parameters surrounding the charter movement using exploratory case study method: 1) What is the evolution of the charter school movement in the United States and specifically in Florida, and the legal precedence that comes from this reform effort? 2) What are legal parameters regarding the charter school movement nationally? (e.g. constitutional law, statutory law, administrative law, common or court/case law, and contract law) and 3) What present legal structures and parameters affect Florida’s charter school movement? The significance of this study lies in the need to understand significant legal parameters surrounding the current charter school movement and how policies and law related to charter schools impact stakeholders. All of the findings together signify the important role legislators and the judicial powers execute in the ongoing realization of the charter school movement. The legal support of the charter school movement fosters an opportunity for the development of charter schools. With charter school implementation, several issues arise in the process of the charter school practice. The study shows the following themes impacting the charter school movement: regulations, accountability, Special Education, facility concerns, innovations, and employee and legislative issues. Charter schools provide a niche for certain parents desiring a different approach from the local public school. Charter schools provide a niche to parents seeking alternatives to traditional public school education. Charter schools will continue to exist and cater to parents desiring school choice options.

The following report is an investigation of growth strategies for charter management organizations. The report begins with an overview of the School Choice Movement and its introduction of market forces into the public education system. Drawing from the private, nonprofit and education sectors, the report introduces three existing frameworks for organizational growth and new market entry. The report evaluates the robustness of each of these frameworks as well as their applicability to charter school expansion through the lens of a case-study investigation of IDEA Public Schools’ expansion from the Rio Grande Valley to the Austin, Texas education market. The report concludes by introducing a new, cross-sector framework for charter expansion that brings together the strengths of existing models as well as the lessons learned from the IDEA case. The framework consists of four phases: pre-expansion, geographic market selection, growth mechanism selection and implementation. / text

Friskolereformen 1992 innebar att den svenska skolan konkurrensutsattes. Expansionen av friskolor var snabb och idag går mer än 25 procent av alla gymnasieelever i en friskola. Denna studie avser att studera kunskapsutfallet av friskolereformen i den svenska gymnasieskolan. Studien baserar sig på en jämförelse mellan 19 län och studerar de förändringar som skett under åren 2004 till 2011 när andelen elever i friskola har förändrats. Som utfallsvariabler studeras gymnasiets slutbetyg, högskoleprovsresultatet samt övergången till högskola. Studien använder sig av multipel regression med länsfixa och årsfixa effekter. Resultaten visar att slutbetyget inte påverkas av andelen elever i friskola, däremot påverkas resultatet på högskoleprovet marginellt negativt. Studien finner dock samtidigt att andelen elever i friskola påverka övergången till högskolan marginellt positivt. / The number of independent schools in Sweden expanded rapidly as a result of the 1992 voucher reform. The effects were most noticeable in the upper secondary school with more than 25 percent of all Swedish students currently attending a private school. The aim of this paper is to examine the effects on upper secondary students' study-results as a result of the voucher reform. The paper compares study-results for 19 counties covering the years 2004-2011. The measured outcome variables used are grade point average, SweSAT-scores and transitions to higher education. The tool of analysis used is a multiple regression with county- and year fixed effects. The results from this paper show that grade point average is not affected by the number of students attending private schools, the SweSAT-scores drop marginally with a higher number of students in private schools. Finally the results display a weak positive link between the number of students attending private schools and transitions to higher education.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 393-410). / Microfiche. / 2 v. (410 leaves), bound 29 cm

The overarching theme of this thesis concerns the possibility of balancing the values of unity and pluralism in education in developed nation states characterized by an increasing pluralism when it comes to the beliefs and values of its citizens. The author suggests that democracy has a normative basis in the principle of reciprocity which can be supported in an overlapping consensus by reasonable persons who differ in their moral, religious and philosophical beliefs. It is argued that this basis mandates a deliberative kind of democracy and that certain implications follow for how to understand the relation between democracy and individual rights, between democracy and religious belief and speech, and between rationality and deliberation, among other things. The author proceeds to discuss three educational issues in relation to the principle of reciprocity and its implications: 1. The legitimacy and content of a mandatory citizenship education, 2. Children’s rights to develop personal autonomy, 3. The opportunity for parents and children to choose which school children attend. These issues are important in relation to the question of how to balance unity and pluralism in education in that they concern the promotion of certain common beliefs, values and dispositions among citizens or the creation of a system of choice between schools with different profiles. The purpose of the discussion is to construct a theoretical position which balances the values of unity and pluralism in education, by giving diversity its due (contra communitarianism) while upholding a measure of unity (contra libertarianism and radical multiculturalism) which is located in the democratic and autonomy- promoting purposes of education rather than (exclusively) in its economic/vocational purposes (contra neo-liberalism). The discussions make use of political philosophy, educational philosophy and empirical research carried out by other researchers.

Since the 1990s in Australia, education policies have created an environment in which competition among schools has increased and parental choice of school has been encouraged. This has been coupled with practices of corporatisation, marketisation and performativity, which have led to the proliferation of a new type of independent school, which operate in the outer suburbs of large cities, target a specific niche market, and charge low cost fees. This study examines the reasons parents are making the choice to send their children to a new, non-government schools in preference to other alternatives and the role of promotional material produced by the school in that choice. The case study of one such school, The Shelbyville College, involved in-depth interviewing of parents at the College as well as a Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough) of the College's prospectus and website which act as performative tools to measure the school's effectiveness in the market. Using Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural capital, the study showed that parents interviewed were choosing this type of school to increase the educational and social status and career prospects of their children as 'extraordinary children'. Through such discourses, parents as consumers of particular schooling products and their engagement with the promotional activities of the College are produced as 'good parents'. Seeking and engaging with promotional material helped remove any dissonance that may occur from a long and expensive relationship with the institution. In choosing this particular school, parents were seeking 'good Christian values' and the freedom to actively engage in their children's education. The College, through its promotional efforts, promises to build on familial habitus and inculcate valued cultural capital in order to make students more successful academically and socially than their parents. The promotional materials of the website and prospectus emphasised the co-curricular involvement in music, speech and drama and invite parents into a discourse of success through the College's educational offering which creates 'extraordinary children'. The uniform mandated by the College is another 'text' in the production of extraordinary children as outlined in the prospectus and website and is an important site for identity production. The uniform demonstrates, not only the disciplinary regime and preparation for professional dress, but also the prestige and esteem derived from the consumption of high status products such as non-government schooling. It is expected that the findings of this study will have relevance for government schools that are the primary competition for new, non-government schools and will lose funding if they continue to lose students. The study will have some implications for CEO (Catholic Education Office) schools that have traditionally provided a low-cost alternative to the government sector. Parents in the study reported choosing the new, non-government school because of differences in values, and perceptions of safety and status improvement offered by these schools. The continued success of the new, non-government schools is also likely to have broader effects on social and educational inequality in Australia through their effects on the government school sector.

The Swedish educational reforms in the beginning of the 1990s, introducing a public-funded voucher system, free school choice and the right to run schools as commercial enterprises, had an important impact on upper secondary education. The Stockholm region, the most populous in Sweden, offered favourable conditions for the growth of a previously non-existent educational market. A massive expansion of independent schools took place, managed primarily by larger companies, along with the extensive marketing of profiled study programmes and the import of management models from the private sector. In 2011 alone, schools competed for 75 000 pupils representing an annual economic value of approximately 8.5 billion SEK. Covering the period 1988 to 2011, this thesis analyses the relationship between the educational market and upper secondary education as a social field structured by the educational strategies of social groups. Building on Bourdieu’s relational sociology, the study combines quantitative and qualitative methods, using correspondence analysis as a major analytical tool. While free school choice and the voucher system established a supply-demand relationship between schools and families and pupils, the analysis shows that the market has submitted to the same forces that structure the field of upper secondary education within which it unfolds, primarily the volume and composition of symbolic and other assets that students, families and schools possess. In fact, the social structure of the field of upper secondary education in Stockholm remains remarkably stable over time, opposing on the one hand female and male dominated education and on the other hand education with high social and scholarly recruitment to that with low. Euclidean clustering analysis unveils a complex social structure reflecting how the increasingly differentiated educational supply has adapted to the needs of various social groups. Elite schools, market-oriented schools and market-exposed schools develop different strategies in the battle over pupils. Competing amongst themselves for pupils rich in inherited and acquired capital, the elite schools withdraw from the openly market-oriented approach that characterises the other type of schools and instead opt for more subtle, long-term strategies for building up trust from their audience, involving investments in staff and other institutional assets.