One of the most salient social phenomena of our times is the rise of global cities and the associated remaking of national middle classes into global new middle classes as a consequence of economic globalization through global corporations that are restructuring welfare states and making them into neoliberal states. Much has already been written about economic differentiation within the middle class as a result of deregulation of national markets and the unprecedented changes taking place in work and family life. Less well documented but equally salient for class formation is the effect of global processes on the changing culture of the urban middle class. And one of the most salient aspects of middle class social reproduction, old or new, is quality education as a path to occupation destinations and a cultural ideology of consumption that reinvents what it means to live “a comfortable life.” This urban ethnography of middle class formation through selective education is a contribution to the larger project of the comparative study of elite education and formation of middle classes in this era of globalization. It comes at a time when the value of testing in the context of human capital development and the increasing option of privatized alternatives to public education are being aired in newspapers and on television and when families are seeking alternative forms of schooling for their children.

      While the relationship between the new middle class and selective education in world cities is everywhere becoming more apparent, the dynamics of class formation by means of selective education remain particular to state formation, national economic policies, family formation, local cultures, and national education systems.¹ This book is an ethnographic account of those dynamics as expressed in the struggle of middle-class families in Istanbul to provide their children with quality education during a period of transition during an early phase of global integration. Its internal logic turns on families' perception that for their eleven-year-old children to have a comfortable life, they must win the national state-directed Selective Middle Schools Examinations (SMSEs). The odds that they will fail are daunting and at times overwhelming. The result is a social drama in which wives act against their own will and become exam-obsessed mothers who engineer and design their children as test machines, while fathers, embittered by what they perceive to be a corrupt system that would turn families into an instrument of state policy and expose them to the economic exploitation of a market for education services, go into deep denial or passive resistance.

      This story is told in part through the voices of parents who provided us with discourse themes from their narrative accounts of the system and their struggle, itself a complex construction that requires a reflexive stance on bureaucratic rationality and standardization. These interpretive themes appear in different chapters and become part of the larger analysis of a changing middle class from 1983 to 1997. From one perspective, middle-class formation is shaped by a transformation in state formation and market forces that have bifurcated and transformed what it means to be middle class. From a perspective inside the middle class, families became liberalized and made the agency of their own class reproduction, including a class awareness of what is at stake. We emphasize that