This article reviews three books: (1) "Elite Education: International Perspectives" (edited by C. Maxwell and P. Aggleton); (2) "Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalisation" (J. Kenway, J. Fahey, D. Epstein, A. Koh, C. McCarthy, and F. Rizvi); and (3) "Corporate Elite and the Reform of Public Education" (edited by H.M. Gunter, D. Hall, and M.W. Apple). These three books, published within a few years of each other, are all aiming to expose aspects of the relationship between elites and schooling. They offer, in different but complementary ways, very valuable contributions to contemporary debates on (elite) schooling and on the role education plays in social reproduction. They point to competing processes inflicting elite schools today--an imperative to become 'global' on the one hand (which includes neoliberalisation and changing financial pressures and imperatives) and yet a need to remain insular, exclusive and isolated from the wider world.