Will Brehm  1:08
Sean Drake, welcome to FreshEd.

Sean Drake  1:09
Thanks for having me.

Will Brehm  1:10
So, can you tell me a little bit about this school where you conducted an ethnographic study called Pinnacle High School? What was it like walking the grounds of Pinnacle?

Sean Drake  1:21
So, Pinnacle is a large, public high school in suburban Southern California, and it is on 55 acres of land. It has multiple buildings to house different courses. It’s got a math department, humanities departments, social sciences, languages. So, it’s got these different departments housed in different buildings. Lawns are always cut, very green, manicured trees everywhere. It’s a very green campus. It’s an open campus, so students can enter from kind of all sides. It’s very much -you know, it looks like something you’d see in a movie or on a television show. It looks like a lot of college campuses. And so, walking around there, you really feel like you’re sort of at a major institution. And you know, there are athletic facilities, there’s an Olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis courts, all-weather track, football field, there’s a baseball field that’s kind of in immaculate condition. So, it really has everything that students need. So, you kind of see those resources and opportunities, really, as you’re walking around the campus there.

Will Brehm  0:57
And this is a public school. It’s not a private school by any means?

Sean Drake  2:35
That’s right. It’s a public school. You know, a little bit over 2,000 students. So, it’s a public school, which means that students attend Pinnacle if they live within the school’s residential catchment zone. So, there are neighborhoods that are tied to certain schools. And so, the students who enroll in Pinnacle do so because of the zip code in which they live.

Will Brehm  2:57
And so, what’s the racial makeup of the school because in the US, school racial makeup is, as you’re saying, tied very closely to the community makeup because public schools serve those communities.

Sean Drake  3:09
So, this school looks quite a bit like the surrounding area I call Valley View, which is a pseudonym. I think one of the defining features of the school is that it is over 50% Asian-American in terms of the student population, and that is something that is reflective of Valley View, which is nearly 50%, Asian-American in composition. And most of those are Chinese-American and Korean-American families. So, this is a destination city for many East Asian immigrants who moved to Valley View because of its good weather, really well-rated public schools, very low crime rate, especially violent crime. It’s one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the city of its size in the United States. So, I think all of those things make it a really attractive place to move, especially for immigrants of some means. And so, tend to see quite a few Chinese and Korean businesses around the city. And certainly, this is a school that is sort of targeted by both those immigrant communities. You know, there’s also a sizable population of white students, kind of in the 40% range. And then the Black and Latin X students together comprise about 10% of Pinnacle’s population. And that’s similar to what the percentage would be in Valley View overall. So, I think that the school in many ways is reflective of the larger population.

Will Brehm  4:35
Right. And so, what is it like to be a student at Pinnacle? I mean, I would imagine it’s quite different depending on who you are, in a way. What is your racial background, what is your immigration background, what are your parents’ background. So, you know, take me through. What are some of the stories that you found about students navigating and studying in Pinnacle?

Sean Drake  4:55
Yeah, it’s a really interesting school. I would say the kind of defining feature of the school is that it’s very academically rigorous. There’s a lot of pressure on the students to perform. There’s a lot of competition among students for grades, for test scores, for college admissions. And this is something that actually starts before students even arrive at Pinnacle when they’re 14 years old or ninth grade. So, it has this reputation that extends beyond. So, students in middle school, you know, they might talk to each other “Oh, yeah, you’re going to Pinnacle? Oh, I heard there’s a lot of homework”. Now, these are sort of rumors and things that swirl around, and then they get there and they find out that many of these things are true. So, it’s a school where students are working really hard. It’s a school where students are taking multiple kinds of honors, or advanced placement type classes to try to help them with their college admissions. But it’s also a school where students are playing sports, or in the band, or involved in arts, taking multiple languages. So, it’s a school, I think, where students are just doing a lot. And they’re doing this with an eye towards college admissions. And not just any college, but an elite college, a renowned college and a college that has a reputation kind of being this sort of excellent institution among colleges. And so that’s sort of the vibe there. And you see that, kind of, in all different aspects of the school. There’s a couple of ways that you, sort of, see this play out.

For example, it’s even in the architecture of the school. So, when you approach the main office, there’s an archway that has the name of the school kind of over the top of it. And on either side of the archway there, in sort of these metal letters attached to the brick, you see National Exemplary School on one side, and California Distinguished School on the other side. And these are actually annual awards. I’ve seen them in other California schools, maybe hung as banners in the gym, or in a main office. But here, Pinnacle has essentially tattooed these distinctions to its building as these kinds of immutable aspects of its institutional culture and identity. And so, in the book, I write about this thing I call the “institutional success frame”, which is this collective kind of definition of achievement that’s cultivated by all institutional actors. Whether it be teachers, administrators, students, other staff, parents. And so, at Pinnacle is what I described as sort of this very rigorous environment where everybody’s trying to get a 4.0. And the problem with that is, you know, not everybody gets a 4.0. And so those who don’t attain this high level of success, especially those who may fall well short of it, for whatever reason, you know, can tend to feel a certain amount of alienation. But also, what I find is that sometimes even students who are having great what we may, on paper, think of as great success can feel a certain amount of alienation, because they don’t feel like their success is their own. They feel like they’re working for what their parents want, you know. They want to play guitar but their parents say, “No, you have to play violin” or “No, you have to take an internship in a biotech laboratory.” They don’t even like bio or tech. So, I think I also saw that quite a bit in the school for sure.

Last thing I’ll mention briefly, is they had something in the spring of every year, called College Sweatshirt Day where students would wear different apparel from the college they had been admitted to, and it was a way to kind of celebrate the achievement. The school would take pictures, put it on Facebook, or Instagram, Twitter to say, hey, you know, these are the types of colleges and universities that our graduates get admitted to. And there was one young woman I met who didn’t wear a sweatshirt or any other kind of apparel that day, and I remember asking her about it, and she said, I didn’t wear anything, because it was embarrassing, because I’m just going to community college and not going to a four-year school and not going to a fancy school. And I found out later on that she was the first in her family to go to college. In fact, her parents were Mexican immigrants who had a middle school education and were sort of day laborers and farmers. And so, for her, just graduating high school and going on to college, this sort of tremendous kind of intergenerational achievement in your family. But, you know, in some ways, it kind of paled in comparison to the achievements of her friends whose parents had gone maybe to graduate school and now they were going to maybe the same college of their parents. And so, in many ways, I think you could say that this student who was going to community college was, in some ways, even more successful, but she didn’t feel it, kind of in comparison to some of her peers.

Will Brehm  9:21
And so, at Pinnacle, how many students actually do end up going to four-year colleges? Like, are they successful in this institutional success frame by the metrics?

Sean Drake  9:32
Yeah. So, the school has roughly a 100% graduation rate, which is quite high for a public school with over 2,000 students. So, that would be a graduating class of roughly 500. So, it’s roughly 100% graduation rate and something like 96% of Pinnacle graduates go on to college, and just over 70% go to four-year colleges and universities. That number is, I think, somewhat artificially low because there are a certain number who will take a year off to do whatever. Kind of, they’ll take a gap year as it’s called before going on. There are some, certainly, who go to community college and many of those end up transferring on to a four year. So, I don’t actually know the percentage who kind of eventually graduate from a four-year college but I would assume that it would be somewhat higher than 70%. That 70% figure would be those who just sort of start the next Fall at a four-year university. Those are pretty competitive numbers, you know, particularly for a large public high school. But I think there is sort of another kind of point in your question, which is that, you know, there are still that sort of 30-ish percent of students who don’t go directly to a four-year college. And so, for all of those students, in some way or another, there’s sort of some level of explaining to do. It’s like, “Oh, why aren’t you going to Berkeley? Or why aren’t you going to New York University? Or why aren’t you going to UCLA”? And I think that that is something that many students have to answer, just like, “Why aren’t you wearing a sweatshirt from your college? Like, what’s going on”?

Will Brehm  11:03
Yeah, God! It must be so tense and so much anxiety, I would imagine.

Sean Drake  11:07
Lots of anxiety, mental health, sleep deprivation. I had parents tell me, “My daughter is at Stanford, and I’m so proud of her for that but she doesn’t look well. You know, she looks like she’s killing herself for these achievements and I just don’t know if it’s worth it”. So, I had several parents tell me sort of stories like that. Trying to kind of rein students in. Pushing them really hard, and then saying, “Oh, maybe we pushed them a little too hard” and trying to dial it back. But sometimes it can be too late. So, yeah, definitely a pressure cooker of a school. And, you know, one where students had a lot of success on paper but sometimes that success could take a toll.

Will Brehm  11:34
So, I guess that raises an interesting question about what happens to the students who don’t do well? Because, you know, in any school, there’s going to be some students who do not do well on academic rigor, and this really high-pressure cooker environment as you’ve just described. So, what happens to them? Are they given extra support and then end up graduating and going on to these four-year schools as you’ve just described? What happens to these students who are struggling?

Sean Drake  12:11
Yeah. I think students who are struggling are not -I would say that it’s a very tough environment for students who are struggling because the idea in Valley View -and this pervades all of the comprehensive high schools in the district, not just Pinnacle- is that high academic achievement is expected. And so, for students who struggle, they’ve fallen short of that. And I think there’s a tendency in this district to blame students for struggling, to sort of attribute it to something maybe internal to the student: their motivation, the values in their family, their goals, their ambitions, their aspirations, their expectations of themselves. And certainly, that may be true some of the time. But I think more often than not, there are things maybe beyond a student’s control that can limit their achievement. Or maybe they simply don’t want to take five honors courses and stay up past midnight every night, and be tired all day, and be spread thin every month of the year. Some students don’t want to do that. They want to have fun, they want to hang out with their friends more, they want to do those things, too. And I think that’s okay. So, I think the issue is, for students who don’t fit that mold, who don’t fit into that institutional success frame, they can feel alienated, they can feel marginalized, and the school can actually push them out. One thing that I found is that schools like Pinnacle tend to cater to students who are sort of already doing well. It’s like they’re in the business of polishing diamond. So, they want to take the students who are achieving really, really highly, and see, maybe we can get this student into an Ivy League school. And that’s kind of their mission. And I think that that means that students who are more to the middle or struggling more actually tend to fall by the wayside. Tend to kind of fall through the cracks more.

Will Brehm  14:06
So, you said that the school itself can push them out. So, how does that work? What does that actually look like?

Sean Drake  14:11
So, it’s interesting. When I started this project, I was just interested in Pinnacle High school. It’s a school similar to a school that I attended in my youth and just looking at the percentages, looking at the ethnic and racial diversity that was also similar to my own experience, where I was often one of very few Black or brown students in any class that I was ever in growing up. And so, I was interested in the experiences of Black and brown students who were at Pinnacle. What was their experience like in the school? How did they find community? What was their experience like outside of school in their neighborhood? How did that affect their in-school experiences? How did that affect their aspirations and expectations in school? And so, I started out by hanging out in this US history classroom, and there was a student named Jamal. He was Black, he was a sophomore, he was a good athlete. He was on the varsity football and basketball team as just a sophomore. And I would get a seating chart from the teacher for each class so I can see who was there that day. And this is a class that had maybe -it was a big class- maybe 35 students in it and maybe three or four of the students were Black. And so, one day I got to school, and I noticed that his name had been crossed off the seating chart, like marked out in a Sharpie, permanent. And I said, that’s sort of funny. So, after class, I asked this teacher, you know, what happened to Jamal? And she said, Oh, he’s been transferred to Crossroads for credit recovery. And so, at that time, I didn’t know what Crossroads was. I didn’t know what credit recovery was. I had lived, at that time in Valley View, for three years, I knew about all the other high schools. I didn’t know about Crossroads. I had never seen it. I had never heard of it. And I had never heard of credit recovery in my life.

And so, I asked her about that, and she said, Oh, that’s an alternative high school where students go if they’re behind on their credits, or if they are falling behind. And so, it’s a place where they can go. They can make their credits up, so they can graduate on time with their class. That’s the goal. They go there and then they transfer back at some point after they’ve made up their credits. And then they can graduate from Pinnacle, or from one of the other comprehensive high schools with their class. And so, Crossroads is not a neighborhood school. It draws its students from the four other comprehensive high schools in the district. And so, I went home, and I Googled the school as well on the district website. And I was really struck by difference in the size of the school, it only has about 200 to 250 students. Students are transferred in waves over the course of each academic year, and the racial composition of the school was very different. So, roughly half of the student population at Crossroads is Black or Latino. Whereas at Pinnacle that was about 10%. At Crossroads, less than 10% of the student population identifies as Asian, whereas that’s over 50%, at Pinnacle. Percentages of white students are roughly the same. But I was most struck by the fact that Black and Latino students were overrepresented by roughly a factor of five in the district at crossroads, and kind of similar numbers of under-representation for Asian students. And so, I wondered, what’s going on here? Why are more of the Black and Brown students being transferred to crossroads? there were also many more students who the districts categorized as socioeconomically disadvantaged. That was roughly 50% of crossroads, and just over 10% of Pinnacle.

So, a very different socioeconomic status among the student body, and also students with disabilities, who were almost 20% of crossroads, and just about 5% of Pinnacle. So, you have all these over-representations of Black and Brown students, of students with disabilities, of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Why are those the students being shepherded out of the comprehensive high schools? Why are those the students being funneled to Crossroads. And so, once I found out about these schools, and this kind of alternative education system, then the book became a comparative ethnography between Pinnacle and Crossroads. The differences in the curriculum, differences in the physical space, the differences in the racial composition, the differences in the teacher responsibilities and classroom dynamics. So, that’s really what the book is about. So, it’s a form of segregation. It’s a form of tracking sort of different levels of a curriculum, except it’s tracking that’s happening between schools rather than within them. And to me, that was what was somewhat unique about this case.

Will Brehm  18:43
It’s insane! I mean, when I read the book, it’s absolutely insane when you read what’s happening with this alternative school and the credit recovery system. And it just sort of blew my mind reading it. And so, I guess, we have to sort of go back to the beginning here. I mean, what is it like walking into Crossroads?

Sean Drake  19:01
So, Crossroads is very different. It’s very -it’s jarring. Especially if you’ve been to Pinnacle, or one of the other high schools in the district. And sometimes when I do PowerPoint presentations on this work, I’ll put up a split screen slide, kind of showing a similar picture taken from a similar vantage point at the two schools, and it’s just very, very different. And so, Crossroads, whereas Pinnacle was on 55 acres, Crossroads is on less than eight. Whereas Pinnacle has lots of green space, whether it be fields or tall trees, Crossroads has very little green space. In fact, the grass in front of the school is overgrown, the trees aren’t pruned, the hedges that frame one of the gated entrances is sort of, trimmed but parts of it are brown like they’re dying, they need water. So, there’s just almost like a different level of care just in terms of the upkeep of the grounds. And there’s a perimeter fence that runs around Crossroads. It’s very imposing, it’s metal, it’s about eight feet tall. Students can’t leave the campus during the day. That fence there is a gate that’s locked all day. So, there are only one entrance and exit through the main office which is very different than Pinnacle where students can leave from multiple sides. They can leave, go to their car during a free period, walk down the street to the market, or to the ice cream shop or to the gas station where they can buy snacks or candy or Gatorade. There’s none of that freedom for Crosswords. Once students are in, they’re kind of locked in all day, they can’t leave, they have no off-campus privileges like the students at Pinnacle have.

Will Brehm  20:39
It’s like a prison.

Sean Drake  20:40
Yes. It’s very prison-like. And I actually had several students at Crossroads refer to it say “Oh, it’s like we’re in prison. Or it’s like we’re being punished. It’s like they think we’re delinquents, that were bad kids”. And I think it’s particularly striking when you remember that the only reason students are there is because they’ve been struggling academically. They’re not there because they’ve committed or done something illegal or engaged in illicit activity on campus. There is actually another alternative school for that. This is the alternative school for students who are just struggling academically. And in fact, some of them aren’t struggling academically. So, there were students who got transferred to Crossroads simply because they maybe came from out of state, or they came from another district in the middle of high school, and not all of their credits transferred. So, then they were labeled credit-deficient, and had to go and make it up. So, instead of going to this kind of fancy public high school that they envisioned that their parents probably planned for when they moved, they find themselves at Crossroads with these fences and this asphalt, and these buildings that look like they’re sort of low-slung rectangular buildings that look like trailers. And those are the classrooms. And the last feature I’ll mention about Crossroads is that these trailer looking buildings are arranged like three sides of a rectangle, and then there’s a fence around it. And so, what that means is there is sort of nowhere for students to be kind of by themselves. There’s no privacy. So, either you’re in a classroom, or you’re sort of stepping out onto center stage, kind of in view of everybody else in the quad, which is something else that makes it feel very prison-like. You’re sort of always being watched. And I think that’s something that students really feel, and they feel like there’s sort of a lack of trust. And that makes it a difficult place to be, particularly when you’re coming from one of the other high schools and you experience just that drastic difference.

Will Brehm  22:39
So, what is it like for a student? I mean, do students at Crossroads end up recovering credits and going back to these comprehensive schools where they were shifted out of? Is it academically rigorous, where students at Crossroads are really being mentored and tutored and supported to get those credits to go back to the comprehensive school?

Sean Drake  22:57
No, that’s the simple answer. It is not. And I think that’s somewhat ironic because what’s happening is, the students who need the most help are being pushed from the school with the most resources to help them to a school that actually has fewer resources to help them. And just the academic environment is very different. So, imagine a school that’s populated with students who have fallen behind on credits. That’s a different environment than a school where everybody is sort of pushing to see which college they’re going to get into. And so, what I found is that students would often arrive at Crossroads with a fair amount of motivation to get back on track. If for no other reason than that they wanted to see their friends again, they wanted to be back on campus, maybe they wanted to have access to the art program. Or at Crossroads there’s no library, there’s no sports teams, there’s no after school, there’s no clubs, there’s no PTA. So, I think sometimes students were really motivated. They wanted to get back to, kind of, what they would call a “real” high school and be able to do real high school things. But over time, their motivation would wane, and they would sort of get sucked into this culture of academic apathy, which, I argue is created by the district when they essentially concentrate all of these students who are behind in one school. And so, the students at Crossroads don’t have a lot of kind of positive peer academic role models around them in the school to take their cues from and to study with and to sort of kind of help lift them up in a sense, and to keep them on the right track and to motivate them. You know, I don’t think that’s intentional on the part of the district. I think that they kind of envision this working in a different way. But during my time doing this research, I found that only about 17% of eligible Crossroads students transferred back to their comprehensive high school. So, that’s students who had recovered enough credits to do so. And in part that was because they decided it’s easier, or we barely have any homework. I don’t really want to go back. Or it was because sometimes there would be a lot of resistance from places like Pinnacle who wouldn’t want to accept students back and there’d be this back and forth?

Will Brehm  25:13
Why –

Sean Drake  25:13
I think that Pinnacle overall and I think a lot of the decisions that they made, I think they were thinking about their reputation. I think they were trying to manage that reputation. I think that they saw some students as beneficial to that reputation and other students as detrimental to that reputation. And I think Jamal kind of offers a case in point. So, after he was transferred to Crossroads -well, a couple things about Jamal. One thing I’ll say is that he often had trouble seeing the whiteboard at Pinnacle. And he would sit in the back of the room. His assigned seat was like, farthest from the whiteboard. And he would have trouble seeing the room. And he would say things. I mean, remember one time in class, he said, “I can’t see the board”. And the teacher said, “Well, why not Jamal?”, he said, “Because I’m blind”. And everybody kind of chuckled. They sort of thought he was kidding and thought he was a class clown. But he wasn’t kidding. He needed to wear glasses for his vision. Now, he didn’t always wear his glasses, which was his responsibility. But the school never did anything to follow up with him, to call home, make sure he has his glasses with him. They never really did that. When he got to Crossroads, they looked at his case file, they said, “Oh, this student has trouble seeing”. So, they put him at the front of the room. They made sure he brought his classes to school. But even if he didn’t, he was up at the front not the back. So, there were times in which the Crossroads environment could be beneficial. Sometimes in that intake process, they would find something that Pinnacle had just overlooked or made assumptions about.

Jamal actually recovered a lot of credits really quickly to the point where I actually saw him back at Pinnacle three weeks after he had been transferred. And he was on his way to football practice. And I found out that Pinnacle was allowing him to play football but they actually weren’t allowing him to be in the classroom. So, he could play sports for Pinnacle, which didn’t have a very good football team, because he was their best player. But he couldn’t be in the classroom which I found really strange. You know, I was actually a scholarship athlete in college. And you know, if you’re on like, academic probation in college, what do they do? They take your sport away. They say you can’t play in the game. They don’t say you can play in the game but you can’t go to class. So, in some ways, Pinnacle, to me, was sort of doing it backwards, right? They were essentially saying you’re an asset to us on the field but you’re a liability to us in the classroom. I think that was the message they were sending. And I’m not sure that’s the best way to go about education. I think it’s about what can the school do for the student, not what can the student do for the school? I think that was the posture that Pinnacle had.

Will Brehm  28:00
It’s sort of just dumbfounding. You know, when I think about it, it’s just sort of insane. This between school segregation, as you call it. So, you know the US has a long history of segregation in its public schools. Is this a new form? Like, is this something that is relatively new and is happening beyond just these two schools? Like how do you make sense of this type of segregation?

Sean Drake  28:23
Yeah, I think, in general, in the United States, school segregation is linked to neighborhood segregation. What we tend to see in terms of public school systems is, student lives in neighborhood X and that means they go to school X. Another student lives in neighborhood Y, they go to school Y. And so, if neighborhoods X and Y are segregated neighborhoods, then schools X and Y will be segregated schools. I think that’s a simple way to kind of understand it. And I think that’s the most accurate way to understand it. And that’s why various measures, whether it be busing or school choice, are only sort of limited in their ability to address that fundamental problem of kind of residential racial segregation in America leading to segregated public schools. What’s interesting about Valley View is the level of residential segregation in the city is pretty low. It’s one of the lowest of a city of its size in the country. And so, the segregation that I write about in the book is due to these institutional mechanisms, many of which are hidden, like this credit deficiency. These policies around kind of a threshold of credit deficiency, and then pressuring students to transfer and trying to keep them at Crossroads and not let them come back. Those sorts of things. And I sort of outline all of these things in the book. And so, the credit recovery, alternative education, continuation school system, it’s not a new thing. It’s been happening for decades in the United States.

You know, originally it was something that was meant to be kind of a safety net to prevent high school dropout. That was the sort of original idea behind having these sorts of schools in districts. So, it was a way to catch those students who otherwise would drop out. And I think it’s been relatively successful in that. It certainly has ramped up in the last couple of decades. There have been some incentives through various policies and laws on the state level and national level to incentivize public schools to push students to continuation schools in order to keep their graduation rates higher. And I think that’s meant that the numbers have really gone up. So, in the United States, overall, there are roughly half a million kids who attend comprehensive high schools. Almost 90,000 of those are in the state of California, alone. It’s not a kind of a non-trivial amount. I think that the Valley View case is sort of a somewhat extreme case but of something that is pretty widespread in states across the country. And I say it’s an extreme case just because of, kind of, the hyper rigorous, lofty almost cutthroat academic environment. But certainly, you see this in other districts, sometimes you see these schools will be in strip malls, or they’re built on vacant lots, or they’re sort of in more cramped spaces. So, I think that what I’m describing in Valley View is kind of a particularly vivid example of something that we see really throughout the country.

Will Brehm  31:27
Well, Sean Drake, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It’s just so nice to talk to you and congratulations on your new book. It really is just eye opening in a way and I highly recommend it to people just to get an in-depth sort of look at what is happening with between-school segregation. So, thanks so much for joining.

Sean Drake  32:37
Thanks for having me.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Guest Publications/Projects

Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb
Achievement Ideology and Alienation in School
The Segregation of “Failures”: Unequal Schools and Disadvantaged Students in  Affluent Suburb

The Asian “F” and the Racialization of Achievement

Academic Segregation: The Criminalization of “Mediocrity”…

Recommended Resources 

High-achieving Schools Connote Risks for Adolescents
When Parents Seek Perfection
Complexities in Adjustment Patterns among the “Best and the Brightest”:
What is being Black and High Achieving Going to Cost Me in Your School?

The Renaissance of School Segregation in a Context of Globalization

Between-School Ability Tracking and Ethnic Segregation in Secondary Schooling

The Paradox of a Credit-Recovery Program: Alleviating and Exacerbating Racial Inequity
Second Chance or Second Track? Credit Recovery Participation in US High Schools
Credit Recovery: Exploring Inequities, Impacts, and Solutions

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com