Résumé
Urban policies in the United States have put education at the core of their attractiveness strategies for more than twenty years. It is based on the principle that the households’ residential strategies are designed by education strategies. In the case of declining cities, where the demographic decline goes with the financial bankruptcy for public school districts, neoliberalization of education through a competitive and unequal school markets increases the tensions. The article proposes to describe the case of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania as a case-study of a shrinking city, whose school district adopted various strategies in order to deal with decline, and modeling its education policies according to the local context and participating in the neoliberal discourse of urban agendas.