ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how institutional strategies—borrowed from the corporate world—have the capacity to inculcate subjectivities around teaching and learning, school leadership, professional identities and understandings of success and failure. The unique blend is the narrow rhetoric that promotes the belief that adopting neoliberal and corporate practices will fix America's schools and ensure "equity of opportunity" for all, consistently portrayed as the magic bullet to overcoming disadvantage. The ideal charter school teacher believes in the unique blend which is, in turn, foundational to practice. The unique blend, as a discourse, promotes the tenets of neoliberal subjectivity. This is followed by defining the model of schooling which exemplifies the unique blend which is foundational to the everyday practices in a Charter School Management Organization (CMO). As a CMO, Achievement Academy operates over 20 small co-located schools and enrolls upwards of 11,000 students in different sections of the city. Achievement Academy, like most other charters, is widely criticized as a well-resourced "test factory".
