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In this article, Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna examine the political struggles associated with detracking reform. Drawing on their three-year study of ten racially and socioeconomically mixed schools that are implementing detracking reform, the authors take us beyond the school walls to better understand the broad social forces that influence detracking reform. They focus specifically on the role of elite parents and how their political and cultural capital enables them to influence and resist efforts to dismantle or lessen tracking in their children's schools. Wells and Serna identify four strategies employed by elite parents to undermine and co-opt reform initiatives designed to alter existing tracking structures. By framing elite parents' actions within the literature on elites and cultural capital, the authors provide a deeper understanding of the barriers educators face in their efforts to detrack schools.

In this article, we discuss how and why educators’ attempts at detracking by providing students and parents with greater “freedom of choice” in track placement often result in little movement of low-and middle-track students into high-track classes. Using data from six racially mixed high schools undergoing detracking reform, the authors contend that these schools’ low- and middle-track students, most of whom were African American and Latino, resisted entering high-track classes because the relationship between their places in the tracking hierarchy and their evolving identities and ideologies shaped the way such options were presented to and perceived by them. The authors conclude that the hidden institutional barriers within schools, the students’ tracked aspirations, and the desire of students to learn in “places of respect” thwarted reformers’ efforts to detrack through the mechanism of choice.

For the last 30 years, the bulk of research on school desegregation has focused on the short-term effects of this policy on the achievement, self-esteem, and intergroup relations of students in racially mixed versus segregated schools. These research foci reflect a more psychological approach to understanding the goals and purposes of school desegregation, viewing it as a policy designed to save the hearts and minds” of African-American students and teach children of all races to get along. This article brings together, for the first time, a smaller body of literature on the long-term effects of school desegregation on the life chances of African-American students. In this article, we argue from a sociological perspective that the goal of desegregation policy is to break the cycle of segregation and allow nonwhite students access to high-status institutions and the powerful social networks within them. We analyze 21 studies drawing on perpetuation theory, a macro-micro theory of racial segregation.

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