Speakers
Description
The state of current educational systems cannot be understood outside of the rise of neoliberalism, which is the defining context of the privatization of education and policies designed to meet parental expectations for more diverse and expanded school curricula for their children. In Quebec, this trend has been identified as the "double fragmentation of the school system" (Lessard, 2019), a process resulting from the growth of the private school system and the rise of selective educational profiles within public schools. This structuring of the school system is commonly referred to as the three-tier school system : private, selective-public and regular-public. The 700 Sport-Studies Programs constitute formal structures par excellence of the incursion of privatization (entry fees, selective process, accelerated curricula) into the public school system while fostering a competitive landscape between the various actors in both private and public schools. How are these programs positioning themselves to integrate public education? This paper investigates two types of strategies used by these programs: (a) strategies of legitimization towards public schools, parents and competitive sports environments; and (b) strategies of organizational sustainability. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, our data consists of questionnaires and interviews within the Sport-Studies Programs ecosystem (school/program administrators, coaches and parents of student-athletes). By playing on both the academic and the athletic fields, it is unclear if and in which context these organizations act as educators, coaches and/or businesspeople.
