Available From UC Press

In Academic Apartheid, sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distinct high schools in a racially diverse Southern California suburb, Drake unveils hidden institutional mechanisms that lead to the overt segregation and symbolic criminalization of Black, Latinx, and lower-income students who struggle academically. His work illuminates how institutional definitions of success contribute to school segregation, how institutional actors leverage those definitions to justify inequality, and the ways in which local immigrant groups use their ethnic resources to succeed. Academic Apartheid represents a new way forward for scholars whose work sits at the intersection of education, race and ethnicity, class, and immigration.

Sean J. Drake is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and Senior Research Associate at the Maxwell Center for Policy Research.
 

"Sean Drake deftly reveals how Black and Latinx youth navigate an educational continuum that can divert them from or directly onto the carceral continuum in America. Instead of assigning failure to young people, this book powerfully illuminates institutional betrayal—when institutions charged with protecting, serving, and educating people fail those who need them most."—Carla Shedd, author of Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice

"Academic Apartheid shows in lucid and shocking detail how school segregation rears its head even in the most advantaged settings. Drake spent nearly two years in a Southern California suburb whose wealth, safety, and school test scores should make it a place where no child gets left behind. But that's not what happens. The district reserves one school—Pinnacle—for its best and brightest, who are largely White and Asian, and another— Crossroads—for disproportionately Black and Brown students who are all too easily cast out of Pinnacle. Drake's vivid account takes us inside the lives of students, teachers, administrators, and parents as they navigate academic apartheid. This book is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand how a complex system of school inequality persists."—Tomás Jiménez, author of The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants Are Changing American Life

"Academic Apartheid makes an indelible impact on the field of race and ethnic relations and provides a sophisticated analytic framework to systematically examine how schools reproduce inequality and structure success in an affluent community. Drake's powerful ethnography on high-income Korean-identified and African American and low-income Latinx students' educational trajectories illustrates the widely variable educational outcomes—in a well-off suburban city instead of a low-income urban community—that have puzzled sociologists of education over the last decades. This is a must-read book that offers ways in which public schools can contest racialized and unequal tracking systems in American education."—Gilberto Q. Conchas, Wayne K. and Anita Woolfolk Hoy Endowed Professor, Pennsylvania State University

"Drake's work fills a hugely important gap in the existing literature by showing how even within a successful, well-to-do, diverse school district, institutional success is predicated on pressuring lower-performing students out of their comprehensive high school into a segregated subpar school, even when those students could remain and graduate."—Dana M. Moss, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame