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Recreating Blackness-as-Failure Through Educational Reform? A Case Study of a California Partnership Academy

Vocational educational has long struggled with a reputation as a lower track and dead end for socially disadvantaged populations. Since the alarm call in the 1980s about the “forgotten half,” significant efforts have been expended to develop reform programs that provide disadvantaged populations viable options that would enhance their academic and economic prospects. However, considering the fact that such reform programs consist of a disproportionate numbers of Latinos and African Americans, how do we know that such reforms are not reproducing structures of racial domination? This article, an ethnographic study of a promising vocational education reform, examines race-making in the institutional organization, the representational practices, and the perspectives of students and teachers inside and outside this reform program. I argue that although the academy was a success story to some extent, it encountered negative stereotypes from its host school, while indirectly producing conditions that racially stigmatized its population. This poses questions about racial equity and the role of the institutional culture of the host school in implementing vocational reform programs.