Abstract
Numerous studies reveal the importance of housing and neighborhood inequities in the United States by examining the links between racial and socioeconomic segregation and unequal educational opportunities. In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb, Sean Drake draws on rich ethnographic observations and interviews to study segregation not based on housing and neighborhoods, but rather academic policies and practices. Drake compares two public schools in an affluent Los Angeles suburb: Pinnacle High, a comprehensive school with predominantly East Asian, White, and upper- and middle’class students, and Crossroads High, a predominantly Black, Latinx, and low’income continuation school. Most Pinnacle students enroll in Advanced Placement (AP) classes to help them attend selective four’year universities. Meanwhile, Crossroads students, having been pushed there after achieving an arbitrary threshold for “credit deficiency” (e.g., failing the same course twice), are only offered the minimum courses to graduate and have no opportunity to meet Californian four’year college course requirements unless they are among the few students able to transfer back into a comprehensive school. What unfolds is a story of academic segregation, tracking, and pervasive inequalities that persist within—on the surface—a high’achieving and well’resourced suburban district.
While Pinnacle and Crossroads are in the same middle’class and affluent suburban district, they embody different academic norms and expectations as part of this unequal and segregated academic system. Pinnacle promotes an institutional success framework in which there is a “collective, institutional interpretation of academic achievement that is cultivated by institutional actors, such as administrators, teachers, parents, and students” (pp. 31–32). In this high’pressure academic environment, students experience stress and anxiety to maintain high levels of academic and extracurricular achievement. At Pinnacle, Ivy League university pennants hang on classroom walls, and school officials endorse a spring College Sweatshirt Day, mainly for seniors enrolling in selective colleges. Yet Drake notes that achievement at Pinnacle is a highly racialized experience wherein Asianness (most Asian students are of Korean or Chinese backgrounds) is associated with the best and Whiteness, at times, is associated with mediocre academic outcomes. Meanwhile, the academic needs of the relatively smaller portion of Black and Latinx students (who are underrepresented in AP/Honors courses) are rendered as inconsequential within Pinnacle's success framework.
With so many actors buying into Pinnacle's success framework, students who are not at the top or are at risk of failing their classes fall out of the focus of Pinnacle's teachers and administrators. Those students are mainly Black and Latinx students—together, they are two times more likely than White students and four times more likely than Asian students to transfer to Crossroads as a form of credit recovery, which Drake illustrates as a “punishing and demoralizing” transfer experience (p. 183). Though some Crossroads transfers and their parents resist being pushed out of Pinnacle, there is an established joint effort between assistant principals, teachers, and counselors to convince parents and students that attending Crossroads is in their best interest. Drake refers to this separation of students within the same school district, based mostly on racial and socioeconomic lines, as a form of academic apartheid. In this system, students previously underperforming at Pinnacle are now expected to thrive within an institution with fewer resources in a setting of confinement and surveillance in which police cars and armed security officers are regularly visible.
At Crossroads, various institutional forces constrain when students will eventually graduate and how they can transfer back to Pinnacle. However, while Drake comprehensively unpacks the roles of school officials and power dynamics shaping Pinnacle's academic norms and students’ experiences, we see less of a connection between power inequities and Crossroads’ student experiences. For example, Drake details how Crossroads teachers are pressured by the district to adopt the same curriculum used in comprehensive schools, creating a “mismatch between demands of the [Crossroads] curriculum and students’ interests and aspirations” (p. 135). However, Drake's evidence of this mismatch primarily involves teachers’ perspectives of student “behavioral problems” and their view of “apathetic students”; thus, predominantly Black and Latinx students’ behavior and motivation are presented as important culprits in Crossroads’ difficult teaching and learning environment. Though Drake briefly discusses in Chapter Three the role of institutional constraints, including high teacher turnover at Crossroads, Drake does not develop connections between Crossroads’ routinized surveillance, control, deficit’based language, and classroom conflicts. Drake rarely presents the perspectives of Crossroads students about teacher’student relations, which altogether creates an imbalance between how Crossroads and Pinnacle students are presented in the book.
While Chapter Three primarily presents the perspectives of Crossroads teachers, Chapter Four showcases Pinnacle's Korean parents and students as they engage in the institutionalization of ethnic capital by sharing and enhancing ethnic’based community resources and opportunities within Pinnacle. For instance, Korean parents host extravagant teacher appreciation and education events through the Korean Parent Teacher Association (KPTA)—a separate organization from the general PTA. These events are intended to educate teachers about Korean “culture” and “values” and signal Korean parents’ deep devotion to their children's achievement, implicitly helping Korean children to receive extra classroom attention and the benefit of the doubt, such as when facing discipline at Pinnacle. Given that Chapter Four comes directly after Drake's discussion of the criminalization of Black and Latinx Crossroads students and segregated teaching and learning environments in Chapters Two and Three, we wondered how school officials reproduce and respond to the institutionalization of ethnic capital, which could further support the racialization of academic achievement across the two schools.
Drake’s final empirical chapter begins with a conversation with one of Crossroads’ assistant principals discussing how the administration and the district have missed opportunities to effectively help students meet their learning, social, and emotional needs. Though Crossroads did present some opportunities for gainful employment after graduation (e.g., a job fair with local Armed Forces recruiters, professional schools, and academies), these opportunities were sparse. Drake also underscores some of Pinnacle's limitations by highlighting its lack of support for its students of color and exemplifying a crucial need to do more to advance students that do not fit into Pinnacle's success framework. To conclude, Drake presents some actionable steps toward equity that revolve around credit recovery programs within comprehensive schools. Though imperfect, this would create a less marginalized and stratified schooling experience.
Overall, Academic Apartheid highlights the academic segregation and racial and socioeconomic inequalities that persist within a high’achieving and well’resourced suburban district. Useful for sociology of education scholars, instructors, and students, as well as teachers and administrators overseeing school curriculum, practices, and policies, this book serves as a glaring representation of how institutional strategies promoting hyper’competition and hyper’academic success can fail the most vulnerable students. Drake peels back the layers of racial and socioeconomic stratification that exist in this well’resourced school district to shine light on both within’school and between’school disparities that disproportionately affect the educational opportunities of Black, Latinx, and low’income students. In doing this, Drake opens the door for critical intersectionality work within the developing research area of suburban schooling experiences.