In 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled that a system of "separate but equal" schools for Blacks and Whites was "inherently unequal," thus ending de jure segregation in American schools. Racial segregation, however, persists in American schools. While researchers have linked the continued segregation of schools to the racial and class segregation of neighborhoods, school segregation also exists within neighbourhoods and independent of residential segregation. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at two dissimilar high schools, Dr. Drake unveils an unforgiving institutional culture and process of school segregation in an affluent, racially diverse Southern California suburb. A nationally-ranked, elite comprehensive high school, where enrolment is predominantly Asian, White, and affluent, supports an exacting institutional success frame. Students who fall short of meeting this frame are subject to academic segregation; they are jettisoned to a separate and unequal high school, in the same neighborhood, where the enrollment is disproportionately Black, Latino, and working class.These students who experience academic segregation are discredited and criminalized for their academic struggles: at their new school, they encounter restrictive metal fences and ga,EST panoptic surveillance by armed police, and a curriculum that disqualifies them from direct enrollment in a four-year college. Academic segregation reproduces ethnoracial and socioeconomic inequality in an integrated, affluent community, and the institutional success frame provides a rationale for institutional actors to legitimize and justify the inequality. This work has implications for our understanding of the ways in which school reproduce inequality in broader society. A second current of Professor Drake's ethnographic research focuses on the ways in which immigrant groups in the United States marshal their social and ethnic resources (social and ethnic capital) to assimilate in American society. Assimilation scholars have consistently described assimilation as a one-sided process. Whether positing that immigrant incorporation into a new society follows a steady trend of boundary dissolution, or that different immigrant groups assimilate into various strata within a host society, the underlying premise is that new immigrants gradually conform to mainstream cultures and institutions. Few have considered that assimilation can be a two-sided process in which immigrants greatly influence dominant cultures and institutions. Drake finds that highly resources immigrant groups are able to advantage their youth by embedding forms of ethnic capital within local institutions such as schools. This institutionalization of ethnic capital compels local school official to assimilate to aspects of the immigrant culture. As such, assimilation becomes a two-sided process.