Academic Segregation and Symbolic Criminalization: Separate and Unequal Schooling in an Affluent Community

• In Event: 519 - Section on Race, Class and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 02. Attitudes and Identities Among Youth and Young Adults

Abstract

The vast majority of research on educational inequality has focused on the school conditions faced by students and families in low-income neighborhoods, or compared the educational opportunities of disadvantaged students with those of their more privileged peers. But educational inequality also exists within neighborhoods. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at two dissimilar high schools in a diverse, affluent Southern California suburb, this article shifts the focus to the ways in which educational inequality is reproduced through explicit practices of school segregation in an affluent context. An elite comprehensive high school – which is disproportionately White and Asian – manages its institutional identity by benefiting from the presence of a local continuation school: they use it as a threat to keep their students in line, and as a dumping ground for students whom they find challenging. Students who struggle academically and socially are transferred to the continuation school to catch up on course credits, often against their will because the school carries an extremely negative reputation. At the continuation school – which is disproportionately Black and Latino – students are criminalized: they encounter fences that restrict their freedom of movement, armed police patrol, a concentration of disruptive students who abuse drugs and alcohol, and a curriculum that, no matter how well they perform, disqualifies them from direct enrollment in a 4-year college. I discuss the implication of my ethnographic observations in light of current understandings of school segregation and inequality, and broader sociological conceptions of criminality, surveillance, and stigma.

Author

• Sean Drake, University of California, Irvine