Reviews
"This book deserves a place on the reading lists and bookshelves of many readers. It is accessible for multiple audiences as the storytelling hooks the reader while also offering opportunities to reconsider several harmful policies and practices. . . If we hope to create a schooling system that is truly designed to serve all of its students - not just those who reflect the dominant white culture or fit into a specific frame - all of these actors must gain an understanding of how schools as institutions perpetuate racism and criminalization."—Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
"Drake has contributed a set of unique insights into global dynamics with hyperlocal implications. He does so with a depth and richness through which we come to know and inhabit this world."—Social Service Review
"Anyone who cares about equity in education should read this well-researched and well-written book to understand the causes and consequences of academic apartheid."—Social Forces
"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
Read More >