ABSTRACT
Since 2010, the number of urban Chinese high-school students applying to US universities has rapidly grown. Many of these students have chosen emerging international curriculum programs established by elite public high schools in China. These programs prepare wealthy Chinese students for the US college application process by exposing them to an internationalized curriculum. These emerging curriculum programs are public, but their expensive tuition excludes disadvantaged students and creates unequal access to internationalized education. Given China's history of merit-based student enrollment measured by test scores, this is a new phenomenon that promotes the marketization of education.
This paper examines one of these “public” international high-school curriculum programs through ethnographic data, policy documents, webpages, and news sources. Drawing upon Ong's critiques of neoliberalism and Collier and Ong's notion of global assemblage, this paper straddles the fields of critical curriculum studies and critical policy studies to ask: who designs what kinds of curriculum, for whom, for what purposes, in what ways, under what circumstances, and with what effects? This paper validates the mapping of network connections as a way to reveal the social actor networks, interactions, and power relations connected to the development of a particular international curriculum program. Such mapping serves as a new starting point for tracing the movement of neoliberal education policy practices and techniques. By examining certain global forms such as international curriculum, partnerships, and educational experiments, the paper reveals the complicity of various agents involved, the privatization of state education, and the Chinese state's sovereign power.
