We don’t Recruit, We Educate - High School Program Marketing and International Baccalaureate Programmes

Oct 15, 2026

Education reformers have amplified expectations of school choice, pushing schools to use rigorous specialized offerings such as the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and Career Programme to strengthen market positioning. While scholarship covers school choice policies, few studies examine marketing language and materials that schools deploy to attract students for selective enrollment. This study develops meaning-based interpretations of IB Programme marketing discourses in two U.S. high schools using document analysis and multimodal social semiotics, situating school marketing within quasi-market education and business-oriented ideologies shaping the student subject.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time55 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Literature Review

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| “We don’t Recruit, We Educate”: High School Program Marketing and International Baccalaureate Programmes | | --- | --- | Martha K. Donovan & Richard D. Lakes, Georgia State University Abstract Public education reformers have created a widespread expectation of school choice among school consumers. School leaders adopt rigorous academic programs, like the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) and Career Programme (CP), to improve their market position in the competitive landscape. While ample research has investigated the nature of school choice policies, few studies have looked directly at marketing language or materials to probe the meanings of the sales pitches used by schools to recruit students for selective enrollment programs. This study aimed to develop understandings of meanings that emerge from the marketing discourses of specialized secondary programs. It draws from document analysis (Prior, 2003) and multi-modal social semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress, 2010) to investigate the marketing of IB Programmes in two U.S. high schools. American schools operate within the quasi-market education system and engender business ideologies meant to attract program participants and supportive parents. The policy discourses of school choice are maneuvered into marketing narratives to shape the 21st century student-subject. Keywords: school choice, public schools, recruitment and marketing, the International Baccalaureate, semiotic analysis Introduction Schools in the U. S. face competition for students in both the private and public sector (AnastMay, Mitchell, Buckner, & Elsberry, 2012) . In the last two decades, the political lightning rod (Davies & Quirke, 2005) of school choice policy has opened up schools in all sectors to the forces of the market. Those who favor the choice system extol it for providing consumers with the freedom to choose what is best for their children (Chubb & Moe, 1990) . Those who oppose argue that the free market does not yield success for anyone who works hard and that failure is not just a consequence of making the wrong choices in the vast supermarket of educational products (Apple, 1980/2004) . In a marketized system, schools seek the best customers to consume their educational products (Adnett & Davies, 2005; Lubienski, 2006b), and, as such they increasingly depend upon marketing materials to promote specialized curricula and programs (Lubienski , 2007) . Likewise, families increasingly call upon consumer behavior to engage in children’s schooling (Lubienski, 2006b) . It is common in the private school world for graphic design and advertising agencies to be hired as consultants and create schools’ marketing materials (Zimmerman, 2008); however, promotional efforts have also taken place in the public sphere. For example, in 2006 the United States launched a marketing campaign in China, the “Electronic Education Fair,” to draw Chinese university students to U.S. schools (West, 2008) . Marketing is used to generate consumers of a product portrayed as desirable, and in the school sector, this means filling student seats (students as consumers) as well as improving market position (Lubienski, 2006a) . Schools in this framework become rankable with benchmarked indices and accountability data. This study presumes a deeper understanding of schools’ positions in the marketized system can be gained from close investigation of public school marketing materials and discourses. We asked the following: 1) How do marketing discourses convey information about schools’ positions and goals within their communities? 2) How do marketing materials and marketing language convey the values of school programs in the choice system? This empirical study investigates marketing programs in two International Baccalaureate (IB) schools in one U.S. state. One school is situated in the state’s largest metropolitan area and the other within an urban area on the state’s peripheral

FAQs

What does the study investigate about IB programmes?

It investigates how marketing discourses and materials for International Baccalaureate programmes convey meanings about schools’ positions, goals, and the values of the programmes within the school choice system.

Which analytical approach does the study use?

The study uses document analysis and multi-modal social semiotics to analyze marketing of IB programmes in two U.S. high schools.

How does the paper frame the role of marketing in school choice?

In a marketized quasi-market education system, schools seek consumers and improved market positions, so marketing language and materials help attract students and shape identities of schools, programmes, students, and communities.

Oct 15, 2026

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