On 13 January 2009 the US secretary of education, Arne Duncan, made an impassioned case for the importance of education at his confirmation hearing. Duncan argued for the centrality of education in addressing the profound inequalities that characterize contemporary America. Just over six months later, on 24 July, Duncan announced the Obama administration's approach to unlocking the potential of schooling: the market-oriented Race to the Top Program (RTTP). RTTP bet heavily on the ability of markets to improve a schooling system that had failed marginalized students across America. Indeed, as Janelle Scott (2011: 581) writes, a belief in markets was at the centre of the programme, which continued the reform trajectory of the administration of President George W. Bush but with an “emphasis on market strategies [that was] much more pronounced”.

RTTP and its use of markets as a means of addressing social inequality is indicative of an increasing reliance on markets as the means through which all problems must be solved. As Nancy Fraser (2014) has argued, and as is reflected in many chapters of this book, this unwavering belief in the efficiency of markets has led to their expansion to a dizzying array of new fields, from carbon management to elder care. The explosion of areas under market rule has not been a smooth process, however, and has required the articulation of the ideology of market efficiency, with the existing social relations of the fields being marketized. Markets in education are a revealing example of this. Because such markets are often promoted as a means of bolstering education's ability to serve as a (supposedly) meritocratic path to social mobility, markets in schooling are justified not only as an efficient way to allocate resources but also as a moral imperative aimed at helping the next generation of American children succeed.