Review of “Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb”

Abstract

In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb, Sean Drake brings readers into two high schools in a diverse California school district. One is a comprehensive neighborhood school, where high levels of achievement are the norm. The other is an academically segregated “continuation” school, where students from all other high schools in the district are sent when their achievement does not meet the schools’ high standards. Drake shows how the district’s “success frame” of continuously high levels of achievement means that students who slip, even temporarily, are transferred to the continuation school. While based on academic achievement rather than race, Drake describes the separation as a form of apartheid. Clear patterns by race and class distinguish the student bodies of the two schools. Perhaps unsurprisingly, economically disadvantaged, Black, and Latinx students are all more likely than white, Asian American, and nonpoor students to be deemed unworthy of mainstream education and hence placed at the continuation school, which Drake calls Crossroads High School.