Focusing on low-cost English-medium schools, this article investigates whether the ideology of the transformative potential of English-medium education squares with most people's experiences of this education in urban India. It shows how such schools enable socioeconomic mobility among the middle classes while also creating new forms of inequality. It argues that a meaningful evaluation of education outcomes requires understanding students' and their parents' experiences of an education system and its impact on their lives. [English-medium schools, social mobility, postliberalization India, education outcomes, Affordable Private Schools] Volume 50, 2019 152 so their increasing popularity-rather than enabling socio-economic mobility for large sections of the population-merely contributes to the reproduction of existing inequalities (Annamalai 2005; Mohanty, Panda, and Pal 2010). It has also been argued that low-cost English-medium schools in fact doubly disadvantage students because when instruction is offered in a language in which teachers are not proficient, students' access not just to English, but education more generally, is compromised (Bhattacharya 2013; Sarangapani 2009).However, only a handful of studies have examined "education in practice" in the classrooms of low-cost English-medium schools (Bhattacharya 2013;LaDousa 2014;Smith et al. 2005). Furthermore, the outcomes of study at low-cost English-medium schools have tended to be explored in terms of "objective" indicators such as exam scores rather than in terms of the views of the students or graduates of these schools and their families. Finally, while Indian parents' views about the importance of English for their children's lives and future prospects have been examined (Faust and Nagar 2001; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009), and how parents imagine English-medium education and vernacular-medium education has been explored (LaDousa 2014), parental expectations from low-cost English-medium schooling have received less attention. Given that low-cost English-medium schools account for the majority of education provision in many Indian cities, and are attended by a significant proportion of the Indian school-going population, it is important to understand the kind of teaching and learning that take place in these schools, the kind of outcomes that result, and how they match up to parents' and students' expectations. This article attempts to provide such an understanding, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bangalore. In doing so, this article joins anthropological scholarship that has examined whether people's experiences of education match prevalent narratives of education's value. Writing about India, scholars like Jeffrey et al. (2008) and Froerer (2012)-drawing on Bourdieu's work on education, aspiration, and inequality (1974, 1984, 2000)-have argued that education is best thought of as a "contradictory resource" (Levinson et al. 1996, 1), as a person needs to have economic resources and social connections in order to reap its promised be...