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Navigating the struggle: neoliberal meritocracy, Latinx charter school graduates, and the college transition

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Navigating the struggle: neoliberal meritocracy, Latinx charter school graduates, and the college transition

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Content NAVIGATING THE STRUGGLE:
NEOLIBERAL MERITOCRACY, LATINX CHARTER SCHOOL GRADUATES, AND THE
COLLEGE TRANSITION
by
Liane I. Hypolite
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(URBAN EDUCATION POLICY)
December 2020
Copyright 2020 Liane I. Hypolite

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Dedication
To my father for documentaries that radicalized my consciousness.
To my mother who taught me optimism and modeled kindness.
To my sister for the deepest love and laughs.
To my family for their sacrifice.
To my students for being my teacher.
And to my participants for allowing me to learn from their wisdom.

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Acknowledgements
A teapot of boiling water, one Red Rose tea bag, two heavy pours of evaporated
carnation milk and three teaspoons of brown sugar makes my mother’s perfect cup of tea. My
mother did not know how to help me calculate solutions or write essays. Yet in making me a cup
of tea and staying up with me into the early morning hours as I worked on my homework, she
always provided the support I needed throughout my educational trajectory. She came to the U.S.
from Trinidad without documentation in search of better opportunities and worked odd, difficult
jobs along the way to citizenship. My mother raised my sister and I to be empathetic. She
reminded us that when we came across individuals with challenging jobs -a janitor cleaning
someone else's mess or a store clerk dealing with angry customers- that they could have been
her. I want to thank my mother for her daily calls of encouragement from the other side of the
country reminding me to believe in myself throughout a challenging doctoral program.
My father, also a Trinidadian immigrant, moved to a housing project in Boston and
attended public schools at the peak of integration. As the first in his family to graduate from
college, my father advocated for the importance of education and supplemented our schooling
from an early age. During family movie nights, we watched the “Eyes on the Prize” series
documenting the Civil Rights Movement. He assigned us book reports, research projects and
required us to memorize words in the dictionary. When I began the college application process,
my father was there with me at every step, taking notes at parent financial aid meetings and
driving me all over the state to attend tours and information sessions. We learned together. And
as a doctoral student, he continued to be my sounding board and my most important advisor. I
want to thank my father for his intensive commitment to my education.

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When I was accepted to Brandeis University as an undergraduate on the Martin Luther
King, Jr. Scholarship, awarded for academics and community involvement, my parents and I
were ecstatic. After reading the letter explaining my full scholarship, my father reminded me of
Dr. King’s legacy and the responsibility I would carry as the recipient of a scholarship bearing
his name at an institution that has historically championed the needs of marginalized
communities. In that moment I realized that I would not only stand on the shoulders of activists
and leaders before me, but also carry the dreams of my parents and family members with me. I
want to thank my family for making difficult decisions in hopes that it would benefit later
generations. I am grateful to my paternal grandparents for immigrating to the United States in
search of opportunity despite immense hardships and to my maternal grandparents for raising
the most loving daughter I could have ever dreamed of to call my mom.
My undergraduate experience of interviewing prospective students as an admissions
student employee opened my eyes to educational disparities across my home state of
Massachusetts. Upon graduation, I worked on college access and success efforts first as a college
counselor working with Boston Public School students and then as the Dean of College and
Career Advising at a charter school in Dorchester, MA. These experiences of providing direct
service to youth proved to teach me more than any degree program ever could. I want to thank
my former, and forever, students who continue to teach me how to be an educator working
towards social and racial justice.
My students’ insights and challenges inspired me to pursue my doctorate at the
University of Southern California. I wanted to figure out how to scale impact, but the truth is,
scale cannot sacrifice the value of genuine, caring relationships. Our students need to know that
they matter, and I appreciate the many people who have reminded me that I matter as I navigated

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the struggles that come with pursuing a doctoral degree as a student of color. I want to thank my
cohort- the #LastObamaCohort. They have been like a family to me when mine remained on the
other side of the country. I want to thank my advisor- Dr. Darnell Cole. He gave me the space to
pursue the projects I felt most passionate about and reminded me of my abilities whenever I
expressed doubt. I want to thank my committee members. Each one of them has taught me a
valuable skill- how to strive to write beautifully, how to maintain a commitment to scholar-
activism, and how to do the challenging work of racial justice. To the many faculty, staff, and
friends I have made throughout this journey- thank you for keeping me lifted and reminding me
why I pursued this dream.

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Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables and Figures viii
Abstract ix
Chapter 1: An Investigation of Ethnoracialized and Gendered Transitions from 1
Urban Charters to HPWIs
Statement of the Problem 2
Purpose of the Study 5
Overview of the Research Design 8
Key Terms, Definitions, and Related Concepts 9
Organization of the Dissertation 11
Chapter 2: A Review of Pertinent Literature and Theoretical Guides 12
“Choice,” Readiness, and College Pursuits 13
Theoretical Guides 27
Summary and Synthesis of Gaps in the Literature and Related Theories 43
Chapter 3: Research Methods 44
Research Design 54
Data Collection 56
Data Analysis 61
Summary of the Grounded Theory Research Process 67
Chapter 4: Findings 68
Summary of the Explanatory Model of the College Transition 151

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Chapter 5: Summary, Discussion, Implications, and Conclusion 139
References 165
Appendices 197
Appendix A: IRB Approval Form 197
Appendix B: Informed Consent Form 198
Appendix C: Participant Demographic Form 199
Appendix D: Recruitment E-Mail 204
Appendix E: Interview Protocol - Phase 1 205
Appendix F: Interview Protocol - Phase 2a (UC enrolled) 208
Appendix G: Interview Protocol - Phase 2b (non-UC enrolled) 211
Appendix H: Interview Protocol - Phase 3 214

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List of Tables and Figures
Tables
Table 1: Study Participants’ Demographic Profiles 57
Table 2: Study Participants’ Interview Participation 59
Figures
Figure 1: Racism Readiness Theoretical Model (McMickens, 2011) 41
Figure 2: An Explanatory Model of the College Transition for Latinx, 69
Charter Graduates (Hypolite, 2020)

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Abstract
Urban charter schools that serve mostly low-income, first-generation, and racially
minoritized students have implemented college-going school cultures where the guiding ideology
extends beyond merely graduating from high school or gaining acceptance to college. College
completion is the ultimate goal. Though criticized for their rigid disciplinary systems and
curricular focus on standardized test preparation, families still look to charter school options for
their children as a pathway to college. In California, there are 1,275 charter schools across the
state serving 630,000 students, of which over 300,000 identify as Latinx (California Charter
Schools Association, 2018). Access to college counseling and college knowledge development
help facilitate college-going cultures.
Research has recently started to explore how charter school graduates transition to higher
education. This grounded theory study addresses this gap by analyzing 31 interviews with 23
Latinx students who have graduated from an urban charter high school in Los Angeles, College
Prep High School (CPHS). This dissertation details how the college transition process unfolds
for Latinx graduates of urban charter schools. More specifically, I find that participants’
reflections upon their earlier experiences as well as their collective time spent at CPHS
contribute to their alignment with the concept of neoliberal meritocracy- which informs how they
understand themselves, their connections to their cultural communities, and ultimately, how they
grapple with notions of merit and inequality. Ultimately, these graduates are learning how to
navigate historically White institutions (HWIs), but are not prepared for the critical
consciousness or skill sets needed to challenge and change systemic inequality on college
campuses.

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Chapter 1
An Investigation of Ethnoracialized and Gendered Transitions
from Urban Charters to HPWIs
Introduction
The presence and expansion of charter schools inform highly contentious debates in
public education (Henry, 2019; Merseth, 2009). These complex institutions were birthed from
the neoliberal era, which is based on concepts of individualism and “choice” that integrate
private interests into public education. “School choice” is a concept that arose in the 1980s that
encouraged market-driven school reform efforts such as private school vouchers, for-profit
education management organizations, and charter schools (Campi, 2018). Bringing together
unlikely, and what Campi (2018) argues are unstable political alliances among groups, including
political and religious conservatives as well as Latinx and Black parents in city centers, school
choice aligns with neoliberalism. The neoliberal ideology suggests that free-market principles
applied to traditionally bureaucratic public systems, like education, would introduce competition
and raise school quality. Now that charters have been operating for close to thirty years, they
represent an expansive and diverse system of schools.
Urban charter schools in particular make up about half of the distribution of charter
schools in the U.S. These schools tend to be racially segregated, serving students who, as a result
of systemic oppression, are grappling with the effects of concentrated poverty. Urban charters
typically share an explicit, and at times singular, commitment to preparing all of their graduates
for college. This college-going school culture emphasizes not just high school graduation, but
also college preparation, enrollment, persistence, and completion, and is what urban charters
have become known for. Yet, studies have only recently explored their college outcomes. Even

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less is known about the processes that influence how graduates from urban charters transition
from high school to and through college. While most college-preparatory, urban charters work
towards preparing students for college through smaller student-to-counselor ratios, extra
preparation for college entrance exams, as well as opportunities to learn college-knowledge
through formal college-preparation courses, what is missing from the college-going school
culture of urban schools is preparation for the racialized realities of college life for minoritized
students.
Statement of the Problem
This dissertation seeks to explore three key problems that remain as major barriers in
efforts towards educational equity for minoritized students: (1) the roles of charters in addressing
the “educational debt” resulting from disparities in higher education, (2) the influence of
neoliberal approaches to education on transitions to and through college, and (3) the need for
advancing scholarly understanding of college-preparation with attention to minoritized students’
ethnoracialized and gendered college experiences.
The Role of Urban Charters in Addressing the “Educational Debt”
In her 2006 presidential address for the American Educational Research Association
(AERA), educational scholar Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings asserted that nationally accepted
references to educational disparities as an “achievement gap” between White and racially
minoritized groups was a false framing. Instead, she stated that what the public needed to
contend with was an “educational debt.” An accumulation of the disparities based on historical,
sociopolitical, moral, and economic policies and practices, the “educational debt” is the result of
centuries of generational inequalities compounded over time, creating the achievement gap as
one of many consequences that minoritized students face.

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So how do urban charter schools fit within this “educational debt” framing? Ladson-
Billings borrows from economic theory to lay the foundation for her argument. Charter schools
were also established through an economic lens applied to public education. Charters were meant
to bring innovation by those who critiqued the traditional public school system as stagnant and
slow-to-change due to complex bureaucracies. Simultaneously, their ability to make decisions
and changes more nimbly, as well as the option to raise private funds, have impacted resource
allocation throughout the education system. Urban charters in particular aim to provide quality
education to historically minoritized populations, often guided by the idea that students’ futures
should not be determined by their zip codes. While increasing the number of high-quality school
options in under-resourced neighborhoods would ideally help address the “educational debt,”
research finds mixed results about charter school performance. Rather than creating a better
system of schools, charters may just be another system of schools. One area that charters could
be uniquely positioned to provide stronger supports may be related to their college preparation
programs for their students.
Neoliberalism and College Preparation
Neoliberalism is defined as “an ensemble of economic and social policies, forms of
governance, and discourses and ideologies that promote individual self-interest, unrestricted
flows of capital, deep reductions in the cost of labor, and sharp retrenchment of the public
sphere” (Lipman, 2011, p. 6). Equity scholars push-back against neoliberal agendas, claiming
that against the backdrop of free-market capitalism, private interests will transform the purpose
of education into a commodity, rather than a public good (Au, 2016). Extant research has drawn
the connection between charters and neoliberalism based on factors such as heightening
competition between schools, dismantling collective bargaining by removing teachers’ unions

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and certification requirements from charter hiring processes, and recasting efforts towards civil
rights as an individual rather than a collective effort (Henry, 2019). Alternatively, charter
proponents see the benefits as removing bureaucratic barriers to allow for innovation and
efficiency while allowing parents to choose the best option for their child (Merseth, 2009).
What research has not yet explored are the influences of neoliberal approaches on
students’ preparation for and the transition to college. Understanding the college transition
phenomenon is of particular importance for Latinx students because of their overwhelming
enrollment in urban charter schools in California and a continued lack of support as they enroll in
historically and predominantly White institutions (HPWIs) (California Charter Schools
Association, 2018; The Campaign for College Opportunity, 2018). While critical, equity
advocates tend to be anti-charter (Chapman, 2013; Chapman & Donnor, 2015; Dixson, 2011;
Henry, 2019), this study offers important nuance to these students’ experiences that presents both
the benefits and the consequences for equity of a neoliberal approach to college preparation. As
John Dewey (1916) states, “Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but
the quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group” (p. 95-
96). How are urban charters socializing their graduates for college? Furthermore, even if the
educators, leaders, and the school community work towards equity, what are their constraints as
members of the neoliberal institution of charter schools writ large?
Ethnoracialized and Gendered College Experiences
Many urban college-preparatory charter schools aim to prepare their majority racially
minoritized, low-income, and first-generation students for college as a pathway to financial
stability and access to the middle class (Merseth, 2009). Given the implications of an
increasingly racially and ethnically diverse U.S. population, national statistics are increasingly

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dependent on the success of minoritized students. As a result, urban charter school leadership
suggest that greater college success for Latinx students, especially in the Los Angeles context
given the high presence of charters, is simultaneously a moral and economic imperative
(California Charter Schools Association, 2014). While worthy endeavors for the goal of
educational equity, I argue that historical and present-day disparities throughout K-12 and higher
education institutions require that the most marginalized students are not only college-ready but
also racism-ready- that is, prepared for the well-documented racialized experiences that occur on
college campuses across the nation (Harper et al., 2009; Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Minikel-
Lacocque, 2013; Tierney, 1999). These competencies are especially important for racially
minoritized students as they transition from typically smaller and racially homogenous urban
charter high schools to HPWIs.
More recent topics about women of color and their experiences of marginalization along
both race and gender (Jain, 2009; Porter et al, 2019) as well as men of color and concerns about
systems such as campus policing (Smith et al., 2007) exemplify the importance of intersectional
power analysis (Crenshaw, 1991) when studying the college transition process. While extant
higher education literature has unearthed the consequences of hostile campus racial climates, we
have not studied how urban charter school alumni reflect on their social identities, especially
their racial, ethnic, and gender identities, throughout their college experiences.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this grounded theory study is to investigate the ethnoracialized and
gendered experiences of charter school graduates as they transition into and through higher
education with attention to neoliberalism given its influence on the creation of charters. This
study offers how urban charter schools are defining college-readiness and preparing their

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graduates, or not, for the inherently racialized realities of college that influence how students
transition and adjust to campus racial climates.
More specifically, this study seeks to understand how Latinx graduates from College
Prep High School (CPHS) conceive of themselves, especially their racial/ethnic and gender
identities, as they transition to HPWIs. Experiencing four years of a college-going school culture
where the emphasis is college completion and not simply high school graduation make these
educational experiences pivotal. High schools inform the thoughts, feelings, and strategies
students develop as they leave racially homogenous high schools with majority Latinx student
bodies in the local context and adjust to demographically different higher education institutions.
To be clear, the presumption is not that these charter high schools are bastions of racial
equity and that these colleges are spaces of imminent racial danger. I only suggest that by
exploring the experiences of recent high school graduates from a particular urban charter school,
we can begin to understand potentially racialized and gendered dynamics during key moments as
students anticipate, enroll, and adjust to college environments that are new to them, but carry
long racialized and gendered histories.
Research Questions
This study consists of three interview phases that capture the experiences of students at
various points of transition to their college environments across three University of California
campuses: University of California, Irvine, University of California, Los Angeles, and the
University of California, Riverside. The focus of this study is informed by the overarching
research question:
How do Latinx, charter school graduates understand their social identities and their high
school preparation as they transition to college?

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More specifically, the following research questions inform the project’s multi-phased data
collection with the following lines of inquiry:
1. How do Latinx, charter school alumni reflect upon their high school experiences and
more specifically, their college decision process?
2. Prior to enrolling at an HPWI, how do Latinx, charter alumni think about their own
social identities, especially their racial/ethnic and gender identities, as well as their
preparation for college?
3. Upon enrolling at an HPWI, how do Latinx, charter alumni think about their own
social identities, especially their racial/ethnic and gender identities, as well as their
preparation for college?
Collectively, these questions offer entry-points for exploration into the variety of factors that
influence how charter school alumni conceive of their social identities, especially their
ethnoracialized and gendered identities, as well as their college preparation and how their
understandings may change over time as they move between high school and college
environments that are demographically and socially distinct.
Study Significance
This dissertation builds upon and advances prior studies by considering longitudinal
transitions (i.e., first year to second year, junior year to senior year) and the racialization
processes that Latinx, charter school graduates experience. More specifically, I focus on
students’ experiences as they attend three different higher education institutions against the
backdrop of the history and present-day context of race and racism (Harper et al., 2009; Harper
& Hurtado, 2007; Minikel-Lacocque, 2013; Tierney, 1999). Though all of my participants have
graduated from College Prep High School (CPHS) in Los Angeles with a demographic

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population of 80% Latinx, 18% Black, and 2% Asian students, following their trajectories across
four of their graduated classes provides opportunities for seeing how this charter school’s alumni
transition and adjust to new campus environments.
Given the highly politicized nature of charter schools, this dissertation makes significant
contributions to educational research, practitioner efforts, and national conversation concerning
equity in three ways. This study (1) contributes to the unexplored area of higher education
experiences for charter school graduates, (2) places charter schools in the research conversation
about high school preparation and college readiness as well as its varied influences on
ethnoracialized experiences influencing the college transition, and (3) nuances the divide related
to neoliberal influences on education by offering the challenges such a philosophy presents as
well as the agentic, but admittedly limited, opportunities it can create for equity and student
success.
Overview of the Research Design
This study’s research design involves a grounded theory approach to gathering and
analyzing three phases of data collection in an effort to understand the guiding research question:
How do Latinx, charter school graduates understand their social identities and their high
school preparation as they transition to college?
My approach to grounded theory employs a critical constructivist lens (Charmaz, 2017). In an
effort to focus on students’ voices, this study’s main source of data comes from individual
interviews. The first phase included 10 interviews with graduates from the Class of 2019 with the
ultimate purpose of understanding personal and familial histories, their college preparation
experiences as recent high school graduates, as well as their anticipated thoughts about what they
believed college would be like and how prepared they felt for the transition. The second phase

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included interviews with any CPHS alumni who enrolled at one of the three UCs following high
school graduation to get a sense of their college preparation and transition experiences across a
variety of class years. And finally, the third phase included follow up interviews with nine of the
original 10 phase one participants following their first quarter of college to get a sense of how
their earlier understandings of self and their preparation for college remained or changed.
Analytically, I used the qualitative methods program NVivo 12 to store, organize, and analyze
data. I also employed a three-step analytical process involving open, axial, and selective coding
to analyze collected data, which is detailed in the methods chapter.
Key Terms, Definitions, and Related Concepts
The following section offers key terms and their definitions to provide a common
understanding based on extant literature when these terms are used throughout the dissertation.
Urban Charter Schools - Charter schools located in typically densely populated cities that
also tend to serve proportions of low-income, first-generation, and racially minoritized
students at rates that are greater than their state distributions (Center for Research on
Education Outcomes, 2015).
College Transition - The phenomena that students experience as they shift from high
school to attending, adjusting to, and engaging with the culture and norms of their
postsecondary institution (Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Inkelas et al., 2007; Pascarella &
Terenzini, 2005).
Race - An unstable construction that categorizes human bodies and imposes social
structures (Omi & Winant, 2015) and functions as “a significant factor in determining
inequity in the United States” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 48) through involuntary

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and external categorization, typically based on physical attributes assumed to be inherent,
where groups often form out of exclusion (Brubaker, 2009; Hall et al., 2016).
Racism - Policies and practices that impact opportunity structures for people based on
their race and/or the color of their skin informed by one’s relationship to rooted systems
of power, privilege, and oppression (Omi & Winant, 2015; Zack, 2018).
Ethnicity - Groups that have aspects related to geography, culture, language, religion,
meaning-making, and immigration histories in common (Brown & Jones, 2015; Stewart,
2019) based on internal self-identification as well as a history of nation-state formation
(Brubaker, 2009).
Ethnoracialized - “The socially constructed nature of race and ethnicity contributes to an
overlap in definitions; many groups are both racial and ethnic in nature” (p. 2, Hall et al.,
2016); so “ethnoracialized” refers to the often simultaneous processes that people
experience of both identifying as, and being identified by others, with particular racial
and/or ethnic groups.
Minoritized - The process through which certain groups (typically first-generation,
low-income, and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups) are labeled as the
“minority” given systemically limited access to power and resources rather than simply a
numerical underrepresentation (Bensimon, et al., 2019; Gillborn, 2005; Harper, 2012).
Latinx - Rather than refer to individuals who identify as Latino/a with gendered
presumptions, I elect to use “Latinx” as a gender-neutral descriptor (Salinas & Lozano,
2019).

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Organization of the Dissertation
This dissertation study is organized into five total chapters. The first chapter introduces
the main elements of the study and presents the central problems it aims to address. The
statement of the problem reviewed three key barriers to educational equity that this dissertation
addresses including: (1) the roles of charters in addressing the “educational debt” resulting from
disparities in higher education, (2) the influence of neoliberal approaches to education on
transitions to and through college, and (3) the need for advancing scholarly understanding of
college-preparation with attention to minoritized students’ ethnoracialized college experiences.
After reviewing each of these challenges, I discussed the purpose of the study including the
research questions, the design, and key terms.
The second chapter provides a more detailed account of the literature and theoretical
guides that ground this study. I begin by elaborating upon the history and context for the school
choice movement broadly and the expansion of charter schools in particular. I then discuss the
limited data that exists related to charter graduates’ higher education outcomes and experiences.
Given their importance to the current study, the following sections explore college readiness and
aspects of the college transition that matter for minoritized students specifically. The theoretical
guides review the relationship between neoliberalism and urban education and then put these
topics in conversation with Critical Race Theory (CRT) and charter schools. I then provide a
summary of the literature concerning the ethnoracialization and socialization of minoritized
students, particularly as it relates to how these experiences in high school inform their transition
to college. Finally, I distill the more recent theory concerning “racism-readiness” as a frame for
understanding how racially minoritized students prepare for historically White environments.

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Chapter three offers the methodological details of the study, beginning with the rationale
for qualitative inquiry given the study’s purpose. This section is followed by a description of
why grounded theory is the most appropriate approach. I then provide details about the setting
and context for CPHS and the selected college campuses that the participants share in common.
Though the introduction provided a brief review of the research design, this chapter then offers a
more in depth exploration of the three phases of data collection as well as the processes for data
analysis. This chapter concludes with the limitations of the study and my own researcher
positionality.
Chapter four presents the explanatory model that describes how CPHS’ Latinx students
experience the college transition. In addition to a visual model, I provide the findings of the
study by connecting the data to the key features of grounded theory including: (1) the central
phenomenon, (2) the causal conditions, (3) the intervening conditions, and finally, (4) the
consequences- which I define and describe as a belief in “neoliberal meritocracy.” Finally,
chapter five summarizes the study, discusses how its findings build upon and advance extant
theories, and provides implications for scholars, policy-makers, practitioners, and students.
Chapter 2
A Review of Pertinent Literature and Theoretical Guides
Given this study’s focus on the ethnoracialized and gendered experiences of urban charter
school graduates attending HPWIs, this dissertation draws from extensive literature bases and
extant theories to build upon current academic scholarship. More specifically, this chapter
summarizes and synthesizes literature about charter schools, college readiness, and college
transitions for minoritized students, drawing connections across theories related to neoliberalism,
Critical Race Theory (CRT), ethnoracialization, socialization, and newer ideas about “racism-

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readiness.” The purpose of this literature review is to present what we understand about racially
and economically minoritized charter school graduates and their college experiences. The
chapter concludes by showing how this study makes important contributions to gaps in the
literature and theory to inform how we can use students’ ethnoracialized and gendered
experiences to inform advancements to college readiness initiatives to better support college
success.
“Choice,” Readiness, and College Pursuits
The following review of pertinent literature offers the historical context for the founding
and expansion of charter schools across the United States as well as the creation of charter school
types, with an emphasis on the formation of “urban” charter schools. This section is followed by
relevant scholarship about urban charter schools’ higher education outcomes, an underexplored
yet increasingly important area for future research given public criticism concerning charter
approaches to learning and discipline as well as these schools’ focus on college access,
persistence, and completion. I then discuss the concept of “college readiness” by providing
related work in national, state, and local contexts that inform students’ preparation and
interactions with campus racial climates. Finally, I offer how research about students’ college
transitions inform what we understand to be the important elements that outline the challenges
they face, as well as the mechanisms that foster success.
The Charter School Context
To offer the historical and broader context for the creation and growth of charter schools
across the U.S., this section begins by presenting a brief history of the charter school movement.
I then offer how a typology of charter schools has manifested over time, making it difficult to
assess charter schools as a whole. Next, I focus on a particular charter school type- urban charter

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schools and then provide a summary of the literature related to higher education outcomes for
their graduates.
A Brief History of the Charter School Movement
According to Renzulli and Roscigno (2005), there are two historical moments that led to
the creation of charter schools. The first moment involves a series of smaller events including a
conference paper where the author, an education professor named Ray Budde, suggested that
groups of people could be given “charters” by school boards to implement innovative teaching
practices through new educational systems in the 1970s (Jason, 2017). Almost 15 years later,
Budde published his conference paper and education reformers softened to the charter idea.
Albert Shanker, a former president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), suggested
charters be experimented with as long as local unions, teachers, and the governing school board
offered approval (Renzulli & Roscigno, 2005). The second moment of significance occurred in
Minnesota in 1991 where they passed the first charter school law (Berends, 2013). The
legislation passed as a culmination of the growing school choice movement, which describes
education reform efforts that created a series of school options presented as alternatives to TPSs
(Wells et al., 1999).
While state-by-state policies vary, generally, charter schools are independently run by
groups of individuals (i.e., community members, teachers, parents, etc.) or management
organizations with governing boards. The standards charters are expected to maintain depends on
the terms of the charter which allow them to respond flexibly to state government issued
accountability measures without needing to answer to elected school boards or abide by
operation-related laws (Riel, et al., 2018). Without required collective bargaining agreements,
charters can hire nonunion and uncertified teachers and staff (Wells et al., 2002).

15

Mobilization of the school choice movement, including voucher programs, was pushed
into action by politicians, education reformers, and school governance officials employing
market logics (Chubb & Moe, 2011). The theory asserts that less bureaucratic tape and
government oversight allows for competition that encourages schools to improve and innovate to
remain viable choices for students and families, now positioned as consumers on the education
marketplace (Chapman & Donnor, 2015; May, 2006). Parents are then empowered to act
“rationally,” meaning that they can make informed decisions about choosing quality school
options instead of having to attend the assigned, neighborhood traditional public school (TPS).
As smaller laboratories for innovation, charter proponents presumed that effective approaches
could then be taken up in traditional contexts, ultimately helping students enrolled in TPSs as
well and improving public education as a whole (Riel et al., 2018; Zimmer et al., 2009). As
explored throughout this dissertation, these underlying neoliberal assumptions and idealized
predictions were flawed and have significant economic and social implications, especially for
minoritized students.
The Development of Charter School Types
Since their creation in the 1990s, charters have expanded quickly across the United States
and at the same time that there has been an increase in charter enrollment, there has been a
decrease in the number of students attending TPSs (U.S. Department of Education, 2018). By the
fall of 2015, charter legislation passed in 43 states and there were almost 7,000 charter schools
nationwide, with trends indicating that more charter schools are increasing in size, enrolling 3
million students today with estimates that 1 million more are on waitlists for entry (Jason, 2017;
U.S. Department of Education, 2018). Even though charters only educate about 6% of the
American student population, charter schools enroll a greater percentage of Latinx and Black

16

students when compared to TPSs, further warranting critical research about their influences on
students’ ethnoracialized experiences (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2013; Jason,
2017; Musu-Gillette et al., 2017). Across California in 2017, almost 50% of the students enrolled
in charter public schools were Latinx, in part inspiring the focus on Latinx students in this study
(California Charter Schools Association, 2018).
Given the flexible nature of charter structures, there are numerous types of charter school
systems. Larger charter systems include charter management organizations (CMOs) and
educational management organizations (EMOs). Though the lines are blurry, CMOs are typically
“non-profit organizations that operate like districts without borders in the sense that they run
multiple charter schools as well as start new ones” (Berends, 2013, p. 455). The CMO
designation comes with managing two or more schools, and some popular examples include
Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, KIPP, YES Prep, and Uncommon Schools (National
Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2010). EMOs tend to be for-profit entities that can charge
charter schools a management fee, like CMOs, but they do not require guidance from a board,
and they have greater financial independence to manage and use funds (American School
Choice, 2019; Berends, 2013). They include organizations such as Academica, National Heritage
Academics, and Mosaica Education. Smaller charter operations are labeled as “freestanding,”
and also known as “standalone” schools. Most charter schools are start-ups, meaning that they
are newly created schools in comparison to conversion schools, which are TPSs that have been
converted into charters (Berends, 2013). There are many levels of variation across charter school
types, and regional location is yet another important factor as it informs the populations that are
typically served.

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Defining “Urban” Charter Schools
The term “urban” has a complex history as it relates to education. It signifies a range of
meanings, from a densely populated geographical area to a coded proxy for race, often referring
to racially minoritized students. Though it has changed over time, currently, the National Center
for Education Statistics (2006) categorizes school locations in reference to their proximity to
urbanized areas with four major categories including city, suburban, town, and rural. Given the
United States’ history of systemic racism, race matters in regard to who lives in cities (Milner &
Lomotey, 2013). For example, of the total number of Black students enrolled in public
elementary and secondary schools, the majority attend schools in cities (National Center for
Education Statistics, 2013). Despite the multitude of definitions, as it applies to this dissertation
and the current context of city centers, “urban” describes “places where the changing economy
has left many families behind, where poverty and segregation are concentrated, and where
severely under resourced schools struggle to meet the increasingly intense needs of their students
and families” (Darling-Hammond, 2013, p. xi).
As mentioned previously, there is a diverse array of charter school structures, so the
“urban” charter school label is descriptive of a particular school type. Urban charters are located
in typically densely populated cities, and the schools tend to “serve a disproportionately low
income and minority student body compared to the student distribution within their states”
(Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2015, p. 5). An estimated 55.8% of charter
enrollment occurs in urban areas (Epple et al., 2016). In southern California, 68% of the students
in urban charters are in poverty (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2015). Related to
Black students in particular, during the 2010-2011 academic year, the percentage of Black
students enrolled in charter schools nationally was almost double that of TPSs at 29%. Latinx

18

students made up 27% of charter enrollment during the same year, about 5% greater than TPSs
(Epple et al., 2016). Therefore, expanding research about the urban charter school context
matters for understanding how our current system is attempting to educate Black and Latinx
students, especially from low-income backgrounds. The next step requires practitioners and
researchers to look beyond K-12 to understand how racially minoritized graduates of urban
charter high schools fare in higher education.
Urban Charter Higher Education Outcomes
Extant studies have commonly used test scores from state and national standardized
exams to determine the academic quality of urban charter schools. Collectively, the results are
inconclusive and speak to the wide-ranging and diverse distribution of charter performance,
making it virtually impossible to make broad claims about the success of this educational reform
effort (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2015; Sahin et al., 2018). With almost three
decades of K-12 data, we can now look to information about high school graduation and higher
education completion as another important indicator of charter performance. Unfortunately,
studies about educational attainment are hard to find, especially in comparison to research about
the mixed effects of charter schools on measures of achievement during the K-12 experience
(Berends, 2015; Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2013).
A major factor in the understudied area of educational attainment is that district and state-
level high school graduation data have not been reliable (Zimmer et al., 2009). Variation in
students’ residential and school mobility, complicated further by school choice options, mean
that researchers have not been able to directly compare differences in the likelihood of
completing high school as a result of attending charter or traditional schools. One study used
attainment data from Florida, which was difficult to find, and found that students who attended a

19

charter middle school and a charter high school were seven to fifteen percentage points more
likely to earn their high school diploma, compared to those who attended TPSs following their
charter middle school experience (Zimmer et al., 2009). The samples are fairly limited across
these and similar studies which warrant the need for more comprehensive data about charter
students’ high school completion rates.
There are also serious critiques about “push-out” practices, which describe exclusionary
discipline enforcement, that trouble the validity of high school outcomes. One such criticism is
that urban charters “cream,” a reference to “skimming the cream off the top” through selection
bias, students who are more likely to graduate within the public education system (Logan, &
Burdick-Will, 2016; Riel et al., 2018). Even though most charter schools have open enrollment
policies where access is randomly determined by a lottery system, some critics suggest that
families are treated differently in the recruitment process (Patillo, 2015). Additionally, families
who are more traditionally engaged in their child’s education may be more likely to seek out
alternative options to the neighborhood TPS and complete charter school application(s)
(Chapman, 2013; Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2011). Another major criticism of some
urban charters is that they enroll less and counsel out students with disabilities and English
language learners (Barnard-Brak, Schmidt, & Hassan Almekdash, 2018; Frankenberg, Siegel-
Hawley, & Wang, 2011). Though this topic is still up for debate, these claims suggest that urban
charters are not serving similar populations to TPSs, making comparisons between diploma
attainment rates questionable and emphasizing the need for comparisons between charter types.
There has been a more public emphasis on urban charters and their college-going
outcomes. Not only have urban college-preparatory charter schools used their higher education
focus as a strategy for recruiting marginalized families, but college enrollment is also an

20

important selling point for raising private funds from donors interested in college-going metrics
(Hernández, 2016; Wilson & Carlsen, 2016). Many urban charters publicize college acceptance
rates upwards of 90% (Jason, 2017; Whitmire, 2017). Continuing along the path of college
access, the same study that used attainment data from Florida found that, “those attending a
charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than were
their TPS counterparts” (Zimmer et al., 2009, p. xv). Supporting similarly positive but far from
representative results, a study conducted by Furgeson et al. (2012) found that out of four CMOs
with post-graduate data, two had large, positive effects, making them 21%-23% more likely to
enroll students in college than their TPS comparisons.
Even less available than research on college access, are studies about college persistence
for charter school graduates. The Zimmer et al. (2009) study also found that across Florida and in
the city of Chicago, students who attended charter middle schools followed by charter high
schools were most likely to persist two years into college compared to those who attended TPSs
following their charter middle school experience. To gather more data about the outcomes of
their graduates, college-preparatory charter networks in urban centers began collaborating with
Richard Whitmire (2017) on “The Alumni” project, a multimedia series following the
experiences of charter school graduates. A major CMO, KIPP, even changed the name of their
college success support program from “KIPP to College” to “KIPP through College” upon
digging into their alumni data. Ultimately, as Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, and Wang (2011)
clearly state about the gap in charter school research, “we also know almost nothing about the
impact of charters on other achievement benchmarks like graduation rates or college
matriculation, especially for racial and ethnic subgroups, despite their vital importance to the
goals of our public schools” (p. 46). This study contributes to future research and its need to

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center the personal and ethnoracialized experiences of charter alumni as they transition from
their high school environments to their college campuses.
College Readiness
Broadly, “college readiness” describes various aspects of students’ preparation for
college. More specifically, this can include their understanding of and skill sets related to (1) key
cognitive strategies, (2) key content knowledge, (3) academic behaviors, and (4) contextual
knowledge (Conley, 2007). Though a large emphasis has been placed on content knowledge in
particular which undergirds debates about remediation, scholars and practitioners have come to
understand the multifaceted nature of college readiness as resulting from factors inside and
outside the school environment (Conley, 2007; Tichavakunda, 2017). National discussions about
changing labor markets and a growing need for employees with college degrees underscore the
importance of college readiness in today’s education policy directives.
In a recent article, Kolluri and Tierney (2019) analyzed a college-readiness tool, the Early
Assessment Program (EAP), which has been operated by the California State University (CSU)
system and used across California. They find that its alignment with rational choice theory limits
its impact on students as a result of assumptions made about students’ access to information and
agency in making related, informed choices. Alternatively, they offer that a college readiness
approach that is culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) by taking a cultural integrity
approach that values students’ identities, families, and communities and is grounded in the
“complex and stratified sociocultural realities in which students are situated” (Kolluri & Tierney,
2019, p. 8) can empower marginalized students. Klasik and Strayhorn (2018) support the point
that college readiness measures and indicators need to be more sensitive to variation in students’
experiences, including aspects such as selectivity and institution type. The conflation of what it

22

means to be college-ready with preparation for a four-year institution often comes at the
exclusion of the many other pathways that students take to and through higher education (Klasik
& Strayhorn, 2018).
As it relates to college readiness and charter schools, the debate persists between both
sides of the aisle. Charter advocates, like the California Charter Schools Association (2014),
assert that charter schools are meeting the college-readiness challenge by outperforming TPSs in
Los Angeles, the same city where the urban charter school at the center of this study is located.
The California Charter Schools Association (2014) states that in addition to higher high school
graduation rates, charter school graduates complete all college preparatory A-G coursework at a
rate that is four times higher than TPS graduates. Charter critics and prior studies point to
recruitment, push-out, and access to resources as key factors influencing differences detected
between charters and traditional schools (Davis & Raymond, 2012; Lauen et al., 2015). As
mentioned, the data is mixed and inconclusive, yet one consistent theme is that charters in urban,
city centers are increasingly described as offering college-ready and college-preparatory
curricula and educational experiences (Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, 2019; Farmer-
Hinton, 2011; Merseth, 2009) with some data to support stronger outcomes for higher education
(Zimmer et al., 2009).
Beyond general statistics and quantitative studies, scholars have found that while some
urban charters are making progress towards better preparing minoritized students for college,
some challenges remain. For example, when looking at the experiences of Latinx students
attending charters in Texas, the authors found that students appreciated their schools’ college-
going cultures through college fairs, college preparation courses, and access to advanced and
dual-enrollment courses (Martinez, Vega, & Marquez, 2018). Yet, students still struggled with

23

other aspects of college, especially the financial elements such as applying for scholarships and
pathways for undocumented students.
Similarly to how TPSs are challenged to address the effects of concentrated poverty in
major cities (Wilson, 1987), urban charters that serve minoritized student populations face
compounding difficulties too that require them to ensure that students are college-ready. They
must provide rigorous academic curricula, support students’ college knowledge development,
and provide detailed assistance to them and their families with completing the college
application and enrollment processes. As prior scholarship and this study suggest, college
readiness initiatives must also consider the dynamics of college environments that have
historically and persistently made the transition to college challenging for minoritized students
while situating students’ identities, families, and cultures as assets rather than deficits throughout
this process (Castro, 2013; Harper, 2010; Kolluri & Tierney, 2019; Yosso, 2005).
The Transition to College for Minoritized Students
Research has long documented the complexities of the college application and enrollment
processes that create barriers to college access for racially and economically minoritized students
(Bastedo & Gumport, 2003; Long, 2004; Posselt, et al., 2012). While studies in this area
continue as policies and programs shift (Bryan, et al., 2011; Holland, 2014; Martinez, Vega, &
Marquez, 2018), knowledge building about the college transition, persistence, and ultimately
college success for minoritized students have grown in recent decades (Ciocca Eller & DiPrete,
2018; Cole, Newman, & Hypolite, 2019; Roksa & Kinsley, 2019). Scholars and practitioners in
this space have come to understand that their efforts can no longer focus on getting students into
college, but rather must extend to support students into and through college.

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Once students are able to apply, select, and enroll at a given institution, a new set of
challenges emerge as they transition to college. Largely, these difficulties can be placed in
academic, social, and financial buckets. These buckets, though distinct, are not mutually
exclusive in regard to how students experience the challenges associated with each one.
Nonetheless, in terms of academic challenges, minoritized students can be and/or feel
underprepared for college-level work given systemic inequities in K-12 systems and under-
resourced communities (Blanchett, Mumford, & Beachum, 2005; Carey, 2019; Gillock & Reyes,
1999; Hallett & Venegas, 2011), they can face difficulties interacting with faculty and staff in
their new college contexts (Bensimon et al., 2019; Harper, 2009), and they often experience the
consequences of curricular spaces that do not have sufficient supports in place, such as remedial
courses (Complete College America, 2012; Kolluri & Tierney, 2019) and STEM pathways
(Griffin, 2019; Kezar, & Holcombe, 2019).
Economically and racially minoritized students experience a range of social challenges,
from feelings of isolation to hypervisibility during the transition to college, especially at HPWIs
(Jack, 2019; Locks, Hurtado, Bowman, & Oseguera, 2008). Campus racial climate is broadly
defined as, “the overall racial environment of the university that could potentially foster
outstanding academic outcomes and graduation rates for all students but too often contributes to
poor academic performance and high dropout rates for Students of Color” (Yosso, Smith, Ceja,
& Solórzano, 2009, p. 664). “Hostile” or “chilly” campus racial climates often describe these
historical and environmental contexts. These climates inform the status of racial tensions that
influence student development and create barriers to students’ opportunities to transition and
fully acclimate to, and be embraced by, their campus community (Hurtado, 1992; Nuñez, 2009).
For racially and economically minoritized students, their acclimation to college should not be

25

synonymous with assimilation. Rather, their backgrounds and identities need to be valued and
they should be empowered to take advantage of the many resources that universities can offer
(Tierney, 1999; Yosso, 2005). Another social issue that occurs in the transition to college is a
recently growing area of concern related to students’ mental health. Recent data indicates that
when asked to reflect upon the last 12 months, 66% of the college students surveyed expressed
feeling overwhelming anxiety and almost half indicated that they felt so depressed it was
difficult to function (American College Health Association, 2019). Given the aforementioned
concerns related to campus racial climates, some mental health difficulties can be exacerbated
for racially and ethnically minoritized individuals (Mushonga, 2019). Concepts such as
“minority status stress” and “imposter syndrome” play important roles in complicating these
students’ transitions to and through college (Cokley, McClain, Enciso, & Martinez, 2013).
Additionally, with the increasing cost of college, financial concerns across minoritized
students are growing and actively contributing to students’ varying abilities to enroll and persist
in higher education. In the enrollment process, low-income students must learn what forms are
needed and how to complete them by their varying deadlines to access state, federal, and
institutional aid (Dynarski & Scott-Clayton, 2013). Additional processes, such as financial
verification which requires students to show additional proof verifying their income, can further
complicate this process and reduce the likelihood that students will enroll in college (Davidson,
2015). The need to work during college particularly burdens low-income students who must
sacrifice time towards academics to earn money for themselves and their families (Perna,
Cooper, & Li, 2007). For students from racially and ethnically minoritized backgrounds, U.S.
policies have fueled racialized income and wealth gaps that put these students and their families
in particularly precarious positions where they have access to even fewer resources to support

26

their educational aspirations (Addo, Houle, & Simon, 2016; Hamilton & Darity, 2017; Shapiro,
2005; 2017). Even for those who earn their college degree, student loan debt can be
overwhelming. As the federal data show, twelve years after entering school, the typical borrower
who is Black owed 114 percent of what they borrowed originally and the typical Latinx borrower
owed 79% (Miller, 2017; Woo, Bentz, Lew, Smith, & Velez, 2017). To make matters worse,
Latinx and Black people have higher rates of student loan delinquency (Vaghul & Steinbaum,
2016), allowing these challenges to follow them long after college. Additionally, access to
financial aid and resources are especially limited for undocumented students (Ngo & Astudillo,
2019).
Latinx Students and the College Transition
For Latinx students in particular, there are aspects of their college transition experience
that can be especially challenging. Broadly, systemic forces continue to reinforce stratification
and inequities related to access and success. Even though the Latinx population has grown in the
U.S. over the last four decades, only 15% of Latinx people who are over the age of 25 have at
least a bachelor’s degree (Flores, 2017). Needless to say, removing structural barriers and
advancing opportunity for Latinx students is both a racial justice imperative and an issue of
national importance.
In terms of the high school experience regarding the college choice process, factors such
as family (Auerbach, 2006; Kiyama, 2011; Nuñez & Crisp, 2012; Mendoza et al., 2011;
Santiago, 2007; Sapp et al., 2016), the local higher education context (Nuñez & Crisp, 2012;
Perna & Titus, 2004; Sapp et al., 2016), and the broader political and economic conditions
(Perna & Titus, 2004) matter (Dache-Gerbino et al., 2018). For Latinas specifically, one study
found that proprietary, for-profit institutions used geographic proximity, recruitment, and

27

marketing strategies to strengthen their appeal to these students, potentially placing them at a
disadvantage based on their lower value and higher costs (Dache-Gerbino et al., 2018). In terms
of the college transition, students’ families continue to influence how they manage barriers and
attain success (Mendoza et al., 2011). In a qualitative study of 28 Latinx students attending a
PWI, Mendoza et al. (2011) found that students’ family of origin and their campus family
provided support and enhanced their motivation. Other studies have outlined the familial,
interpersonal, social, and financial contexts that influence how Latinx students experience the
college transition (Hurtado, 1992; Solórzano, 1993; Solórzano & Yosso, 2000). Though less
explored, there are also differences in access and enrollment by ethnicity within the broader
“Latinx” ethnoracial category that need to continue to be explored (Nuñez & Crisp, 2012).
The intersection of race, ethnicity, class, and citizenship status continues to constrain
minoritized students as they transition into and through colleges and universities across the
nation.
Theoretical Guides
While this study employs a grounded theory methodological approach, explored in detail
in the following chapter, there are extant theories that inform our current understanding of the
barriers, navigational processes, and opportunities for success that minoritized students face. By
focusing on Latinx urban charter school graduates and their college transitions,
the following sections aim to describe and establish connections and divergent aspects of
theories related to neoliberalism, Critical Race Theory (CRT), ethnoracialization, socialization,
and “racism-readiness.” Collectively, these research areas inform what is known and what is yet
to be understood about the influence of charter schools, as well as neoliberal logics more
broadly, on students’ perspectives and experiences transitioning into higher education.

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Neoliberalism in Urban Education
Neoliberalism is a market-driven ideology that presumes that resources are finite and
must be used in ways that prioritize efficiency. Described as “the defining social paradigm of the
past 30 years” (p. 6), Lipman (2011) goes on to outline the central features and implications of
neoliberalism as “an ensemble of economic and social policies, forms of governance, and
discourses and ideologies that promote individual self-interest, unrestricted flows of capital, deep
reductions in the cost of labor, and sharp retrenchment of the public sphere” (p. 6). Lipman goes
on to argue, in alignment with fellow critics, that neoliberalism has infiltrated our ways of being
along with the systems and structures that influence our everyday lives.
Within educational contexts, scholars assert that neoliberal ideologies have turned
education from a public good into a private commodity (Cannella & Koro-Ljungberg, 2017).
Rather than serving the needs of people and communities, schools and other educational
institutions are providing a service to consumers. With this business logic, competition among
students, schools, universities, and educators is the organizing principle that encourages
individual success over collective opportunity. As mentioned, charter schools are seen as
vehicles of these approaches to education. Many scholars have dedicated their efforts towards
understanding how neoliberalism not only influences the state of public education today but how
neoliberalism has racialized implications, especially for racially minoritized students and
communities.
In a recently published article, Clay (2019) builds on the work of prior scholars to explore
what he calls Black Resilience Neoliberalism Theory (BRN). Using ethnographic fieldwork from
facilitating a youth participatory action project, he finds that the Black students he works with
begin the action research project with a politicized discourse informed by BRN. Clay (2019)

29

cautions that although BRN can appear empowering on the surface, it actually purports
hegemonic beliefs by minimizing the effects of structural racism. Through the valorization of
stories of Black triumph and ingenuity in the face of racism, racist structures, and Black
suffering become normalized, positioning those who achieve success despite these structures as
exceptional. When Black suffering is normalized, as it has been in public perceptions of
inadequate school systems, individual success becomes the ideal while diminishing the influence
of structural forces (Clay, 2019).
Charter schools can be symbols of BRN. When there are individual schools that show
indicators or success, like 100% college acceptance rates, the interpersonal challenges that urban
charter students, teachers, and administrators face in preparing for the social and academic
difficulties that come with transitioning into predominantly and historically White institutions
are minimized. We assume that minoritized students will struggle in these colleges, but believe
that they should and will persist despite the barriers. Urban charter schools are steeped in
neoliberal beliefs and funded by conscious capitalism, which rather than being incentivized by
profit margins, funders now frame their entrepreneurial and philanthropic power as socially just
efforts to improve equity (Buras, 2011).
Critical Race Theory (CRT), Neoliberalism, and Charter Schools
In the last three decades or so of education research, scholars have increasingly grappled
with the salience and consequences of race and racism in educational systems using Critical Race
Theory (CRT). Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate (1995) presented their seminal piece,
Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education, by using the foundations of critical race legal
theory to offer a connection between the social construction of race, property ownership within
capitalist structures, and racial oppression to establish the need for centering race given its

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endemic influence on education. Scholars followed in this tradition by using CRT’s central tenets
to analyze how race and racism impact educational experiences and outcomes (Harper et al.,
2016; Milner, 2007; Solórzano & Bernal, 2001).
While the details can vary, seven tenets are core to CRT: (1) racism is endemic and
adaptable, (2) claims of neutrality, meritocracy and colorblindness should be rejected, (3) the
experiences of people of color are primary and legitimate, (4) instances of interest convergence
should be recognized and analyzed, (5) assumptions of American history should be scrutinized,
(6) racial realism recognizes the impermeability of racism and, (7) CRT must be interdisciplinary
and intersectional given the broad and rooted nature of race, racism and other systems of
oppression (Harper et al., 2009). Critical Race Theory (CRT) has also served as the foundation
for continued analysis of the particular ways that race and racism occur for minoritized groups,
such as LatCrit (Solórzano & Bernal, 2001; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001), AsianCrit (An, 2016;
Kolano, 2016), and DisCrit (Connor et al., 2016) which is specific to members of the differently
abled community.
Though not the only lens, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has served as a useful tool for
unearthing the impacts of neoliberalism on racially and ethnically minoritized populations and
the school systems that serve them. In their analysis of an emergency management (EM)
takeover where the state took control over school districts facing major financial concerns in
Detroit, the authors use critical race policy analysis to show how mechanisms related to
historical context, power, privilege, and exploitation have racialized implications for how the
policy was created and implemented (Wright, Whitaker, Khalifa, & Briscoe, 2018). They assert
that colorblindness, described as resistance to considering racial and cultural contexts (Milner,
2007), is a discursive practice of neoliberalism. The often individualistic, ahistorical neoliberal

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school reform agendas are inherently racialized and CRT scholars use and advance the core
tenets to outline the processes that allow these reforms to happen.
CRT has also been applied to understanding the creation, presence, and future
implications of charters in public education. Researchers have applied CRT’s central tenets to
charter schools to highlight how they impact the educational structure and charters’
consequences for racially minoritized students. For example, Chapman and Donnor (2015) make
explicit connections between the charter system and three of CRT’s tenets: racial realism,
interest-convergence, and intersectionality. In their analysis, they push back against the
assumptions of market-theory to assert that racial realism, which holds that racism will shift and
adjust to reforms to maintain White supremacy, helps explain how charter schools are replicating
injustice. As we see today, charters have become yet another system of schools ranging in
quality, just as we observed under the TPS system, maintaining groups made up of the haves and
the have-nots. To support their claim, Chapman and Donnor (2015) they describe interest
convergence as, “when the advantages of the majority group increase beyond the equitable gains
of the marginalized group(s), even though the reforms are seen as primarily benefiting the
marginalized group(s)” (p. 139). Charter school advocates say that part of their purpose is to
connect low-income, racially minoritized students to college, as the most strategic path to the
middle-class through careers and financial security. Though this goal appears to be social justice-
oriented on the surface, charters are not addressing broader issues. Institutional structures will
likely place their graduates in lower-level employment compared to students from wealthy and
White backgrounds, with access to more expansive professional networks and leadership
opportunities (Golann, 2015).

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Finally, Chapman and Donnor (2015) define intersectionality as, “the differential weight
that various identity markers have on social, political, and economic outcomes, which can be
expressed collectively and individually” and the ways these privileges or oppressions can be
exacerbated for those who hold multiple identity indicators (p. 139). In areas of concentrated
poverty where many urban charters are located, the confluence of race and income become key
determinants. Urban charters often pride themselves on serving high percentages of students of
color, focusing on Latinx and Black students, as well as students who qualify for free and
reduced lunch, a common proxy for low-income status. Urban charters can use their
demographics to identify as advocates for social justice and equity. This identity can be useful
when raising funds from philanthropists who want to help poor students of color (Buras, 2011;
Scott, 2009). The nexus of race and income lead to exponentially challenging experiences for
students and families who are grappling with both racial and economic oppression in and out of
school.
Ethnoracialization and Socialization of Minoritized Students
In connection to the minoritization of particular racial and ethnic identities that inform
the communities most impacted by the consequences of neoliberal school reform and the influx
of urban charter schools, the processes of ethnoracialization and its interaction with socialization
matter for how Latinx and Black students are prepared and trained for college by their schooling
environments. This section begins by describing ethnoracialization and socialization and then
focusing on research about how these processes unfold in high school and college settings that
inform how college preparation and the transition occur for racially minoritized students.

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Ethnoracialization
While “race” often refers to socially constructed group making depending on what are
presumed to be shared phenotypic traits, such as skin tone, hair texture, and eye shape,
“ethnicity” signals commonly shared nations of origin, language, and cultural behaviors (Samson
& Bobo, 2014). The broader critique is that race and ethnicity are often used interchangeably
despite their nuanced differences (Brown & Jones, 2015). Racialization, which is described as a
process whereby social practices, relationships, and groups are given racial meaning, is
continuously theorized, analyzed, contested, and advanced across disciplinary scholarship (Omi
& Winant, 2015). As Gans (2017) details, when new people arrive or are forced into the U.S.
context, they experience racialization where they are othered and deemed as undeserving. These
individuals may also engage in the self-racialization process as an interconnected phenomenon.
If at some point the group is determined to be deserving of inclusion which can occur for a
variety of reasons, as was the case for those determined to be ethnic Whites (Brown & Jones,
2015), they can be deracialized. Yet, this process can also be undone in the reracialization
process. While this is only a brief review of complex processes, these markers help indicate
important group-making experiences. Similarly, ethnicization, which Faist (1994) defines as,
“the political construction and/or mobilization of boundaries between social groups that draw on
ethnic markers” (p. 440-441) occurs across ethnic groups. As Restrepo (2004) argues in their
paper about Blackness in Colombia, ethnicization requires pushing back against essentialist
presumptions so that we see it as a “process of articulation” through relationships among
“territory, identity, cultural tradition, nature and otherness” (p. 699).
Given the intersecting and non-mutually exclusive nature of racialized and ethnicized
processes, ethnoracialization speaks to the fact that even when ethnic groups move towards

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cultural assimilation in a national context, racialization practices that are often employed by
those in positions of power continue to other marginalized groups (DeLugan, 2016). Through
their efforts to model the ethnoracialization process, Brown and Jones (2015) build upon
panethnicity theory to treat “ ascription and self-identification not as sequential but as mutually
constitutive processes whose relative influences and effects vary with the structure of
institutional power relations and the discursive reinterpretation of group meanings and
boundaries” (p. 186). Here, “ascription” refers to the influence of institutions, power, and
structures while “identification” includes self-identity and group mobilization. The model
purports three premises: (1) institutions put group-based identities in place through direct (formal
classifications) and indirect (social value) systems, (2) individual and group identification are
reified and sometimes adjusted based on external ascription, and (3) discursive (re)interpretation
is the process that informs how group members make sense of and negotiate the social
constructions they inhabit. Collectively, this Ethnoracialization Model of Group Formation helps
move away from traditional assumptions about static groups, to a lens that allows scholars to
analyze political, economic, and social-psychological processes at play as groups are supported
or constricted in their abilities to come together and mobilize (Brown & Jones, 2015).
Relatedly, ethno-racial attitudes describe the “variety of race and ethnicity associated
objects: racial and ethnic groups and their attributes, features and assessments of relations
between such groups, intergroup contact, and public policies pertinent to either race or ethnicity”
(Samson & Bobo, 2014, p. 515). As Samson and Bobo go on to argue, “ethno-racial attitudes
structure and are in turn structured by the complex and ofttimes contradictory impulses
expressed through historical and contemporary forces and the practice of individual and
collective agency” (p. 539). Ethno-racial attitudes, beliefs, and identities are foundational to

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understanding broader societal structures and patterns, especially those that lead to ethno-racial
inequality. Ethnic-racial socialization refers to how information related to race and ethnicity are
passed along from adults to children (Kulish et al., 2019). More specifically, ethnic-racial
socialization includes three processes: (1) cultural socialization whereby ethnic and racial
traditions, customs, practices, and pride are shared (2) preparation for bias where messages about
possible instances of discrimination and related coping mechanisms are passed along, and finally
(3) the promotion of mistrust which involves guarding youth from trusting those outside of their
racial or ethnic group (Hughes, Bachman, Ruble, & Fuligni, 2006).
While research in the field of education tends to separate racial and ethnic populations or
use the terms interchangeably, some scholars have used ethnoracialization, or related concepts,
to study groups at the intersections. For example, Richards’ (2017) study of second-generation
West Indian students in New York City found that academic tracking intensified these students’
racial group consciousness and resulted in these students being segregated into lower-level
college prep courses. The author identifies the importance of the specific time and space of 21st
century Brooklyn where students in the study embraced their racial Black identities and their
ethnic West Indian heritage. These findings point to the importance of ethnoracialized analyses
that can be sensitive to local contexts to advance and complicate what we have come to assume
are broad-based truths about particular groups. Sáenz and Manges Douglas (2015) push future
scholarship across disciplines to consider the interconnectedness of these processes, such as the
racialization of ethnic immigrant populations. In education, we must continue to contend with
how institutions, like schools and universities, reinforce or counter the ethnoracialization of
students’ identities and the boundary-making of the groups they feel like they belong to or are
associated with.

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Socialization for College
Drawing from multiple popular theories, socialization describes the environmental,
historical, and parental influences on social development (Barber & Olsen, 1997; Lesane-Brown,
2006). Educational researchers have worked to understand the complex processes of
socialization that students experience throughout the P-20 pathway, with an emphasis on key
moments of transition from one school system to another. For minoritized students, who are
faced with systemic barriers that then manifest in their individual lives in a variety of ways,
scholars have contended with this balance of individual, cultural, environmental, and systemic
levels of socialization. What is evident is that none of these aspects of the human experience
happen in isolation. The following sections consider how scholars have theorized processes
related to socialization by presenting how the collective elements influence the ways students are
prepared for the norms and cultures of the college environment.
Socialization Cultures in Public and Private Schools. In an effort to explore high
school socialization and its influences on college preparation, scholars have compared the
experiences of students who have attended private and public high schools (Jack, 2010). Often
steeped in frames about various forms of social and cultural capital as theorized most famously
by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1990), researchers find that in addition to a host of other
factors, high school experiences matter for how students prepare for and adjust to college (Jack,
2019; Khan, 2010). Both Jack (2019) and Khan (2010) show how the social and cultural
environments of private high schools socialize students to develop an “ease” of privilege that has
adjusted to the modern-day context. This “ease” differs from the privilege of the past which
depended on access to social networks and cultural knowledge of the elite. Instead, privilege
today manifests through one’s ability to move with comfort between the norms of a diverse array

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of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups. Jack (2010) finds that even among students from
similarly disenfranchised neighborhoods and low-income backgrounds, minoritized students who
were able to access a private high school education transition much more easily to elite
institutions than their public school counterparts.
Though urban charter high schools are growing in low-income neighborhoods, they do
not fit neatly into the current public-private dichotomy. Organizationally, they are technically
public schools in that they are free, available to all students, and dependent on public dollars
based on per pupil expenditures. Yet, urban charters also act similarly to private schools in that
they can fundraise private donations and have much more financial autonomy in comparison to
traditional public district schools (Chapman & Donnor, 2015). As it relates to college
preparation, the demographics of charters are more similar to TPSs than private schools.
However, their typically smaller student bodies allow for greater access to college counseling
and curricular supports, which is more similar to private school benefits. Throughout the Los
Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for example, the average student-to-counselor ratio is
378:1 (Favot, 2017). Given these organizational and student-level dynamics, we do not know
how aspects of the college preparation, socialization, and transition processes for urban charter
school graduates match those of their public or private school peers, and which aspects may be
unique to this comparatively new school type. Relatedly, the various forms of capital that are
facilitated by an array of school cultures also matter for socialization patterns.
Dominant Versus Nondominant Capital. Theories related to capital are also key to
understanding socialization processes. Debates about Bourdieu’s (1990) conception of “cultural
capital,” which describes how the norms, tastes, and preferences of dominant groups replicate
advantage, have also been major theoretical topics of concern, especially as it relates to Black

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and Latinx students. Initially, studies of the U.S. educational environment and the experiences of
its minoritized students grappled with making sense of students’ racial, ethnic, and economic
backgrounds as well as their relationship to White, dominant cultural capital. Drawing links
between students’ identities, cultures, and local circumstances led to some deficit notions of
Black and Latinx students’ educational achievement that focused primarily on individuals and
communities without acknowledging systemic forces (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). Others aimed to
nuance the discussions by acknowledging that while there was a dominant cultural capital, often
aligned with Whiteness and more valued in school settings, racially minoritized students
responded to these environments in unique ways that spoke to their resilience and ability to work
within the system to get ahead (Carter, 2005).
As Carter (2005) suggests in her work, the Black and Latinx students in her study aligned
with one of three groups: cultural mainstreamers, noncompliant believers, and cultural straddlers.
Cultural mainstreamers tended to assimilate to dominant schooling processes, noncompliant
believers pushed back against dominant school norms, and cultural mainstreamers navigated
both ends of the spectrum with fluency in both worlds. Given the pattern of schools to mimic
real-world dynamics, Carter (2005) summarizes the “dilemma” that faced participants in the
following way:
… to reject the cultural expectations of schools and other mainstream social organizations
set them up for negative teacher evaluations and academic failure, with profound
consequences for their future success. Yet total conformity to dominant cultural practices
meant an invalidation of DeAndre’s own cultural repertoire and analyses, something that
he could not deny. (p. 14-15)

Here, Carter (2005) lays out the key dilemma that students faced in her study: whether to behave
in alignment with one’s self and community or to accommodate the dominant, majoritarian ways
of being as an easier means of finding success in school.

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More recently, asset-based approaches have once again changed the paradigms through
which we see minoritized students and communities. Cultural wealth and anti-deficit frameworks
question traditional notions of cultural capital by asserting that research should illuminate the
skills, abilities, and knowledge inherent to traditionally marginalized groups, diminishing
assumptions that dominant, typically White and wealthy, groups set the bar for success (Harper,
2010; Yosso, 2005).
The realities that students face are complex, especially as they transition from high school
to college. As is the case across educational institutions, HPWIs especially have histories and
persistent structures shrouded in Whiteness. Prior research suggested that minoritized students
could find success despite this environment through assimilation (Tinto, 1987). An important
turn in more recent scholarship shifts the onus from individual students to institutions to see
students’ racial and ethnic cultures not as deficits, but as assets that colleges should affirm and
empower as a means of academic success (Jack, 2010; McNair, Albertine, Cooper, Major, &
McDonald, 2016; Tierney, 1999; Yosso, 2005). Yet, minoritized students continue to grapple
with the delicate balance between dominant, nondominant, and other forms of capital; the places
where they overlap, intersect, and remain divided.
Capital is not just something students carry with them as they arrive on campus, it is also
continuously generating and changing. For example, in her quantitative study of Latinx students’
transition to college, Nuñez (2009) finds that students with intercultural capital, defined as
competencies related to intergroup relations developed through diversity experiences that are
cognizant of power dynamics (e.g., engagement in college diversity courses, informal
interactions across social identities, etc.), paradoxically experience greater sense of belonging
and heightened awareness of hostile campus environments. The author suggests that students can

40

develop a critical consciousness (Freire, 1973) through cross-racial experiences that both
sensitize them to experiences of marginality on campus, while simultaneously, “utilizing certain
forms of intercultural and social capital, to contend with exclusionary social conditions” (Nuñez,
2009, p. 41). For high schools with racially homogenous student bodies and heightened college-
going school cultures, which are key features of urban charter schools, we have very little
understanding of how their graduates are reflecting on the racialized elements of their transition
to college.
“Racism-Readiness”
When considering how minoritized students transition to higher education and beyond
while managing the racialized realities of their varied environments, racism-readiness is a useful
tool for understanding such processes. With foundations in CRT, McMickens (2011) defines
“racism readiness” as “the preparation of Black women and men to navigate and productively
negotiate racist persons and racist encounters in predominantly White post-undergraduate
spaces” (p. 70). This model was originally created to explore how Historically Black College and
Universities (HBCUs) are preparing their Black graduates for White-dominated post-
undergraduate contexts, such as graduate programs and workplace environments. I assert that
this theoretical model can be a useful point of comparison for also grappling with an alternative
scenario, such as the potential need for the skills associated with racism readiness as minoritized
students transition from a racially homogenous high school to HPWIs.
A clear distinction is that HBCUs have many more institutional mechanisms for
supporting racially minoritized students, especially in comparison to charter schools and HPWIs.
Despite these differences, the Racism Readiness Theoretical Model (McMickens, 2011) outlines
important features that could inform aspects of the college transition process for students in this

41

study. Each element (anticipation, preparation, and response) is presented as a separate category
that summarize not just how racism functions, but also offers how racially minoritized people
grapple with transitioning between environments that are distinctly different in terms of their
racial makeup (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
Racism Readiness Theoretical Model (McMickens, 2011)

Anticipation. Though the “anticipation” category refers to “the racist conditions
participants perceive and experience in post-undergraduate spaces” (McMickens, 2011, p. 90), it
could easily be translated to the racist conditions perceived and experienced by high school
students. “Anticipation” includes four characteristics. The first condition, “onlyness,” is the
assumption that an individual will be one of very few, if not the only, Latinx or Black person in a
space. The second condition, “racially variable expectations,” offers how racially minoritized
individuals may hold expectations for themselves that vary from their White counterparts’
expectations. The third condition, “cross-racial interactions” (CRI), includes participants’
perspectives on what their interactions with White individuals and other people of color might
look like. Finally, “White expectations,” the fourth condition, refers to particular concerns about

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White individuals holding false narratives about Black and Latinx people. These concerns might
include White people carrying lower expectations or viewing racially minoritized people as
tokens or spokespeople for fellow members of their racial and ethnic groups. According to
McMickens (2011), some of these conditions are theorized to be related, as indicated by their
solid and dotted lines (see Figure 1).
Preparation. “Preparation” is the central category for this model and is the theme that is
interconnected to all other parts and representative of the term “racism readiness.” “Preparation”
includes young people’s experiences with “pre-college socialization,” which involves the myriad
of ways that Black and Brown youth are taught and socialized to understand race and racism in
the context of the proposed study, including lessons learned and experienced from racist
encounters. Based on data from his participants, the model’s author names sources for racial
messaging including parents and family members. This dissertation would contribute to the
literature of racism readiness by emphasizing the role of schools, focusing on urban charter high
schools and their pre-college socialization in particular, as they influence how students conceive
of themselves and make sense of their college experiences, especially at HPWIs.
Response. Finally, “response” refers to the consequences or emotional experiences and
outcomes from racialized interactions. In the context of McMickens’ (2011) study, “response”
includes how Black graduates of HBCUs react to racialized nature of White dominated graduate
programs and workplaces. The four types of responses are: maintaining composure, engaging
perpetrators, documenting raced incidents, and performing exceptionality. In addition to theories
related to social and cultural capital, racism-readiness also provides another conversation piece
for understanding the opportunities and challenges students face throughout the transition
process. The longitudinal plan for learning from Latinx urban charter graduates as they

43

anticipate, enroll in, and find ways to adjust to college environments requires exploration.
Racism-readiness as well as the other guiding theories related to neoliberalism, critical race
theory, as well as ethnoracialization and socialization processes that attempt to prepare high
school students for college all inform the context for how Latinx urban charter graduates engage
with the college transition process.
Summary and Synthesis of Gaps in the Literature and Related Theories
This chapter began by detailing the foundational literature bases to this study including
the history of charter schools, conceptual and empirical studies that inform what we know about
college readiness, and the current understandings about the barriers that minoritized students face
as they transition into and through college. Decades of scholarship indicate that institutions of
higher education are not impervious to the social systems and influences that facilitate
educational inequality. As a result, minoritized students who have faced the consequences of
exclusionary practices and policies experience significant disparities at each and every level of
the educational pathway. Though these inequities do not begin there, they do continue and
manifest in unique ways in high school environments. Public and private schools of various
types have long and expansive histories in the United States context. Given the comparatively
new inclusion of charter schools into the mix of options, less is known about these schooling
structures in general, and their impact on students’ college experiences in particular. By learning
from the stories of Latinx and Black students who have graduated from a particular urban charter
high school, this study provides insight into how broader influences of neoliberalism potentially
shape participants’ transitions to college.
Scholars are advancing extant theories related to neoliberalism, CRT, and processes
related to ethnoracialization and socialization at the key point of transition from high school to

44

college. Collectively, they help guide how we understand the experiences of minoritized students
throughout the college preparation, application, enrollment, and persistence stages. High school
contexts help construct what college readiness looks like for Latinx and Black students. These
students tend to face challenges related to access to information about the college application and
financial aid processes as many are in the first-generation in their families to pursue college.
Socialization informs the extent to which students are prepared for the rigors, including
academic, social, and financial aspects, of higher education spaces, especially at HPWIs. To
extrapolate what preparation looks like from these urban charter school students’ perspectives
and consider how that might compare to extant work related to preparation in traditional public
and private schools, we must consider varied theories of capital. Scholarly debates about
dominant versus nondominant capital, as well as deficit versus anti-deficit or asset-based
frameworks, are integral to the analysis of what forms of capital urban charter school students
come to school with, as well as the other forms of capital that the school believes they are
providing with the goal of college success.
The purpose of this current study is to begin to fill in current gaps in the literature related
to urban charter graduates’ college preparation and experiences as well as the influence of
neoliberal socialization on how these graduates consider their ethnoracialized identities as they
transition to college. Though the concept of neoliberalism has been studied extensively in
educational literature, we have not yet considered its implications for college readiness.
Therefore, this study provides the starting point for considering these influences and points in the
direction of future work that can consider how a justice-oriented, collectivist approach to college
readiness might empower minoritized students as they prepare and transition to HPWIs.
Chapter 3

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Research Methods
The following chapter explores this study’s selected methodology, grounded theory, and
related methods (i.e., interviews) as the approaches best suited to address the stated purpose of
this research endeavor. While the broader goal is to understand the college transition experience
for Latinx urban charter school graduates, grounded theory allows the researcher to follow the
data. The research methodology chapter begins by offering why qualitative methods are best
suited for this study followed by a more detailed argument for the use of a grounded theory
approach. Next, I describe the setting and context of the study by offering the criterion used for
selecting sites and participants. This section is followed by data collection and analysis
procedures. I then offer the strategies that I employed to support the trustworthiness of the study.
Finally, I conclude the chapter with consideration of my researcher positionality informed by my
prior and current experiences, my role in the study as the sole researcher, and my reflexive
analysis of how these elements work in tandem to inform the study’s contributions as well as
areas for future work.
Rationale for Qualitative Methods
Much of the research that exists on urban charter school graduates is quantitative. Given
the comparative novelty of charter schools against traditional school types, scholars and the
public have been interested in whether charters’ claims about college preparation result in
numerical markers of college success indicated by college enrollment, college persistence, and
college completion (Booker, Sass, Gill, & Zimmer, 2011; Clark, Gleason, Tuttle, & Silverberg,
2015; Warner & Bluestone, 2018). While much more work is needed to answer these questions
given the diversity of charter school types, there is also a clear dearth of information about the
experiences of these graduates as they move towards, and at times struggle to reach, these

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college benchmarks. Given the gap in our collective understanding of what the experiences are
of urban charter school graduates after high school graduation, a qualitative methodology paired
with qualitative methods is best suited for making impactful contributions to current scholarship.
In comparison to quantitative approaches that seek to understand phenomena through the
use of variables that have properties that are believed to be accounted for and measured across
contexts (i.e. data points representative of race, class, gender, etc.), Maxwell (2012) suggests that
qualitative inquiry has three main functions. Qualitative approaches help us understand (1) the
perspectives that others carry and use to make meaning of their lives and the world, (2) how
physical, social, and cultural contexts inform these perspectives, and (3) the processes that occur
that inform how individuals keep or change these perspectives relative to the phenomena and
relationships of interest. Similarly, Wertz et al., (2011) offer that while quantitative analysis uses
measurements that inform understandings of magnitude, even the most developed tools still
cannot tell us about “what a subject matter is in all its real-world complexity” (p. 2).
Methodological Approach: Grounded Theory
Grounded theory began in the discipline of sociology in the 1960s and has grown into a
well-documented and commonly utilized theory-building approach across the social sciences
(Wertz et al., 2011). In an attempt to reduce the gap between theory and empirical research,
grounded theory works to generate useful theory that will be relevant to one’s research by
creating theory directly from systematically obtained and inductively analyzed data (Glaser &
Strauss, 1967). Grounded theory involves collecting and analyzing data simultaneously so that
each process informs the other rather than treating them as distinct, mutually-exclusive practices
(Bryant & Charmaz, 2007). The traditional scientific method begins with a theory in mind upon
embarking on a research project and uses a deductive approach to then collect data to confirm or

47

disconfirm the theory. Grounded theory requires the researcher to engage in “the iterative
process of moving back and forth between empirical data and emerging analysis [making] the
collected data progressively more focused and the analysis successively more theoretical” (p. 1).
Though traditional grounded theory applications (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) have employed
logics more closely aligned with quantitative approaches and the positivist era by emphasizing
rigid systematic data collection and analysis, more recent shifts have taken on different
epistemological stances (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007). My approach to grounded theory employs a
critical constructivist lens (Charmaz, 2017). In comparison to traditional techniques,
constructivist grounded theory views the systematic procedures as guidelines to be considered
and adjusted given the research context, instead of strict rules to be abided by. Working from a
base assumption that individuals construct multiple realities combined with a critical perspective
that is attuned to positionality and power, this approach requires a highly reflexive process
(Charmaz, 2017). When developing a project and embarking upon the research plan, critical
inquiry has an eye towards emancipation and transformation by making meaning of the research
questions so that they can expose oppression and inequality, as this study aims to do (Charmaz,
2017). Constructivism and critical inquiry require that the researcher is constantly asking
questions of the data and generating new questions from prior data. The researcher must also
scrutinize the process by reflecting on their positionality, decisions, and analysis cyclically. I
describe in further detail how I engage in this process in the research design, data collection, and
data analysis sections.
Setting and Context
High School Setting

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The urban charter high school at the center of this study has been given the pseudonym
College Prep High School (CPHS). CPHS was founded in collaboration with a local university’s
school of education and is run by a non-profit charter management organization (CMO) that also
oversees other charter high schools in southern California. The school opened in 2012, making it
fairly new in comparison to other longstanding charters that have been around for decades.
Comparatively, CMOs like KIPP Public Charter Schools and Alliance College-Ready Public
Schools were founded in 1994 and 2004 respectively. Though it has always been in Los Angeles,
CPHS changed its location in 2019 from a couple of floors in a downtown office building to its
own freestanding school in South LA. Co-locating with other organizations and schools as well
as using buildings with non-school functions, such as old churches and former religious schools,
are common occurrences for urban charters looking for physical space in already crowded city
centers (Harper, 2018; Stokes, 2019; Strauss, 2019). CPHS serves roughly 100 students in each
of their grades 9-12 with over 500 total high school students and an average graduation rate
above 90%. Their racial and ethnic demographics include about 80% of students who identify as
Latinx, about 18% who identify as Black/African American, less than 2% who identify as Asian,
less than 0.5% who identify as White, and less than 0.5% who identify as multiracial. Sixty-one
percent of the study’s sample of 23 Latinx students mentioned living in the same neighborhood
as today’s CPHS campus, South Central, which has a median household income of less than
$60,000.
CPHS also features a unique approach to teaching and learning that includes integrating
technology into every aspect of the educational process. For example, though students attend
traditional classrooms and have subject-specific teachers, they follow an online, module-based
curriculum allowing for individualized learning. With this combined online and in-person

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curriculum, students set the pace to ideally ensure a stronger understanding of key concepts. In
addition, every senior is required to enroll in a year-long college readiness course, which also has
a linked, step-by-step module that walks students through the application and financial aid
processes. There is a full-time college advisor and a full-time alumni advisor. Both the
overarching CMO and CPHS advertise a 100% college acceptance rate to four-year universities
for all of their graduates. In addition to an explicit college-going culture, CPHS also enforces a
“no excuses” discipline model that requires students to wear uniforms and follow specific rules
related to their behaviors based on the system of merits and demerits. This type of discipline
model is common across many charter schools.
Institutional Context
In 2019 when this study began, CPHS graduated almost 130 students. Data shared by the
alumni advisor indicated that by that summer, the Class of 2019 graduates were on track to
attend over 40 different institutions of higher education that fall, including mostly four-year and
two-year colleges and universities. I used this data to determine that there would be far too much
institutional variation to use the entire alumni base as a potential sample. I then needed to decide
which institution types would be the best fit for my initial research question which sought to
understand how students were making transitions to campuses with distinctly different racial and
ethnic demographics in comparison to CPHS. Another important factor, to address the
institutional variation concern, was that I needed to choose institutions with a critical mass of
CPHS attendance. Upon consideration of both the campus demographics and the number of
alumni attending, I determined that three of the public University of California campuses would
be the ideal fit for my institutional sample. More specifically, these campuses fit since they
enrolled a critical mass of CPHS alumni and had campus demographics that drastically differed

50

from CPHS in that they had much fewer Latinx and Black students and majority White and
Asian student populations. I selected the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of California, Riverside (UCR). From the
class of 2019, 21 graduates planned to enroll at these campuses in the fall. Of CPHS’s total
alumni base, which includes three other classes of graduates ranging from the class of 2018 to
the class of 2016, 42 students started their college careers at one of the three UCs. This gave me
a total possible sample of 63 individuals.
In terms of the UC campuses, they each have a rich history and current context that
informs students’ experiences overall, as well as the experiences of Latinx students in particular.
The following sections describe each campus’ notable features including acceptance rates,
rankings, demographics, and incidents that inform their campus climates related to topics such as
race/ethnicity and gender.
University of California, Los Angeles. The most competitive and oldest of the three
institutions, UCLA is ranked #20 on the 2020 National Universities and #1 for the Top Public
Schools list from the U.S. World News and World Report and was founded in 1919. Located in
Westwood, this residential area offers a suburban feel that differs from the busyness of most Los
Angeles neighborhoods. In Fall 2018, UCLA had an acceptance rate of only 14% for the
incoming freshman population of over 30,000 students (U.S. World News and World Report,
2020). UCLA has a six-year graduation rate of 90% and meets 83% of the financial need of its
students (The College Board, 2020). In terms of the campus’ racial and ethnic demographics,
28% of students identify as Asian, 27% as White, 22% as Latinx, and 3% as Black. Additionally,
UCLA serves students from higher-income backgrounds with a median family income of
$104,900- among the highest for colleges and universities in California (Chetty et al., 2017).

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Though more politically engaged than UCI and UCR (as stated by study participants) and
many of its peer institutions in southern California, UCLA has also been scrutinized for limiting
access and fostering the exclusion of minoritized students as well as for the unfair treatment of
campus employees (Roosevelt, 2019; Tran, 2018; Tryggvadottir, 2017; Wigglesworth, 2018).
UCLA has also grappled with campus incidents that have harmed members of their community.
A 2019 post by UCLA’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion department noted multiple incidents
around particular university apartments including the yelling of racist and sexist, derogatory
language as well as racial profiling. Concerns around gender equity have also occurred with a
UCLA doctor and multiple individuals associated with Greek life accused of sexual assault (Han,
2019; Preal & Possee, 2018; Watanabe, 2018). While these are nationwide concerns that cannot
be limited to occurring at one institution or even exclusive to higher education in general, this
backdrop offers insight into the campus environment that students are transitioning into.
University of California, Irvine. Ranked #36 on the 2020 National Universities and #9
for the Top Public Schools list from the U.S. World News and World Report, UCI was founded
in 1965 and serves close to 30,000 undergraduates. Known for its medical programs and
scientific research, UCI has an acceptance rate of 29%- double the rate of UCLA (U.S. World
News and World Report, 2020). With a graduation rate of 83%, UCI meets 84% of the financial
need of its students (The College Board, 2020). UCI is located in Irvine, a suburban area within
Orange County. One participant described it as a “planned city,” referencing its history of
intentional architectural design that organized the city into smaller villages surrounding the
University of California campus (City of Irvine, 2020). Today, UCI’s campus demographics
include 36% of students who identify as Asian, 26% as Latinx, 13% as White, and 2% as Black.
Of the total Latinx student population, 80% are the first in their family to attend college

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(Carapezza, 2019). Additionally, more than half of UCI’s graduating Class of 2019 were first-
generation college students (UCI News, 2019).
Located in a more politically conservative area, participants attending UCI described it as
a fairly quiet campus. A campus climate study conducted in 2013 found that though students
stated that they were generally happy with the climate and had positive academic experiences,
23% of respondents shared that they had personally experienced “exclusionary, intimidating,
offensive and/or hostile conduct” (Rankin and Associates Consulting, 2013, p. 36). These
responses were reported at higher percentages for individuals who identified as members of
underrepresented minority and multi-minority groups as well as genderqueer and transgender
respondents. Around the time of this report, an Asian-American fraternity was criticized for one
of its member’s use of blackface in a parody music video (Kingkade, 2013). With a cross-
cultural center committed to fostering inclusivity, UCI has multiple initiatives around supporting
minoritized students but continues to do a poor job recruiting Black students like many of the
UCs as evidenced by its dismally small 2% enrollment figure.
University of California, Riverside. With a #91 National Universities ranking and a #39
ranking for the Top Public Schools list, UCR was founded in 1954 and has the smallest
undergraduate population with a little over 20,000 students and the largest commuter population
of 70% of the three UCs (U.S. World News and World Report, 2020). Originally called the
Citrus Experiment Station as a part of the land-grant history of U.S. higher education institutions,
UCR maintains its agricultural connections through formal agricultural science programs in
addition to the many other majors and resources that UC campuses have to offer (College of
Natural & Agricultural Sciences, 2020). With a graduation rate of 75% and the ability to meet

53

86% of students’ financial need, 42% of UCR’s students identify as Latinx (the largest among
the three campuses), 34% as Asian, 11% as White and 3% as Black.
Though Riverside is technically a large city, the campus maintains a suburban feel. Under
the guidance of the same UC campus climate survey mentioned when discussing UCI, UCR
found similar results regarding the experiences of students of color and genderqueer individuals
in addition to concerns about sexual harassment and the experiences of individuals with
disabilities (French, 2014). In 2015, students protested on the UCR campus against racial
injustice and in defense of Black students who felt marginalized on campus (Juarez, 2015). Just a
year later, there was an instance of vandalism of the UCR Ethnic Studies Department in what
appeared to be an anti-women of color and anti-Muslim incident (Molina, 2016). Given the large
presence of Latinx students, participants largely felt like they were represented across campus
and in classes in ways that differed from the other two campuses as further explored in the
findings chapter.
Research Design
Given the grounded theory approach to this study and this methodology’s explicit focus
on the data -the data being the perspectives, meaning-making, and actions of participants- I have
elected to focus on student voices. In alignment with a critical, constructivist approach, my goal
in centering Latinx student voices is understanding their transition to college by presenting their
perspectives in context (Charmaz, 2017). Critical approaches to research and data require that an
analysis of student data allows for balancing students’ lived realities with the influence of
systemic forces to create frameworks that acknowledge the complexity of education’s most
persistent concerns (Patton Davis & Museus, 2019). To allow for students to share aspects of
their lived experiences that feel most salient to them, I elected to conduct semi-structured,

54

individual interviews. This approach gave me the structure I needed to have questions prepared
in a way that made sense chronologically while covering topics of interest based on my initial
research question. Through this approach, I had the flexibility to follow along with how students
shared information in ways that made sense to them rather than limit their communication to a
rigid protocol.
I conducted three phases of data collection, with data from each phase informing later
protocols and approaches. When I began data collection in the summer of 2019, I started by
interviewing recent CPHS graduates from the Class of 2019 for two reasons. The first reason was
that they had the most recent and vivid recollection of what college preparation looked like based
upon their high school experience. In comparison to older classes of alumni, members of the
Class of 2019 could also speak to the changes that CPHS made most recently given that they are
a fairly young high school and have been described as “experimenting” with new approaches
often by participants. Second, these students had not yet experienced college life, so their
perspectives provided an interesting baseline to return to after they spent some time acclimating
to college. I began the first phase of data collection with the following guiding question in mind:
“How do Latinx urban charter school graduates reflect on their social identities, especially their
ethnoracial identity, as well as hypothetical racialized college experiences prior to enrolling at
HPWIs?”
As I conducted interviews and simultaneously coded them in batches, which is described
in greater detail in the data analysis section, I made three observations that informed my phase
two interview protocol. The first was that students who identified as women mentioned having
particularly challenging experiences at the intersections of their ethnoracial and gender
identities- making gender an additional topic of importance. The second change was that students

55

felt overwhelmingly confident about their preparation for college and noted that in addition to
academics, they felt that elements of the school culture and disciplinary system related to the
uniform and no-excuses policies were other aspects that contributed to their college readiness.
This topic was unexpected for me and an aspect I wanted to explore further. Initially, I was most
interested in how students transitioned from a majority Latinx high school environment in terms
of student demographics, to UC campuses with very different racial and ethnic compositions.
Given that these participants had not experienced college yet, I gave them two hypothetical
scenarios to reflect upon. The first was based on entering a large lecture hall and noticing that
you are the only Latinx student in the classroom (which likely never occurred in high school) and
the second was based on a real-life bias incident that occurred on their college campus in recent
years. Responses to the prompts asked them how they might feel and what they might do in
reaction.
The second phase of data collection involved interviewing CPHS graduates who had
enrolled at one of the three UCs across the total alumni based, which spanned the Classes of
2018, 2017, and 2016. This group included both students who persisted at these institutions as
well as those who may have started, but for a variety of reasons, no longer attended UCI, UCLA,
or UCR. This phase of data collection helped me understand students’ experiences across
multiple years of the college transition. Those who did not persist also provided insights into the
reasons why they faced difficulties that resulted in these outcomes.
The third and final phase of data collection included follow up interviews with members
of the Class of 2019, who I interviewed during the first phase of data collection. With a quarter
of their first year of college completed, they shared how their predictions faired in comparison to
their lived experiences as new college students. In comparison to the phase 1 interview protocols,

56

which focused on details about their high school experiences, the phase three interview
emphasized their college life as it related to academics, finances, and social environments. Our
discussions about CPHS focused on the extent to which those high school experiences informed
or prepared them for college. I also asked about the extent to which the two prompts from the
first interview mirrored their individual perspectives, or not, as it related to their campus
experiences.
Data Collection
Rapport Building and Participant Recruitment
Prior to this particular study, I worked on a research team conducting a mixed-methods
study about CPHS alumni over the course of the last three years. Using elements of the
Culturally Engaging Campus Environments Survey (CECE) (Museus, 2014; Museus, Zhang, &
Kim, 2016) for the quantitative portion and individual interviews for the qualitative segment, our
team looked broadly at college outcomes for CPHS alumni across all of the institutions in which
they enrolled following high school graduation. While conducting these interviews, I grew
curious about some of the comments that participants made about feeling nervous about speaking
up in class as the only student of color or challenges related to coming from a high school where
their peers looked like them and often shared their perspectives and then transitioning to
campuses where that was not the case.
In thinking about this potential “racialized transition” that CPHS graduates may have
been experiencing, I spoke to the individual who supports alumni at CPHS who I had been
working with throughout the project. He agreed that this felt like an important area of exploration
and he provided me with the approval and the list of institutions where members of the class of
2019 planned to enroll. Following my analysis of this list, he then gave me the contact

57

information of CPHS alumni attending the three selected UC institutions. He also invited me to
alumni events, like the summer BBQ, so that I could connect with their graduates in person to
explain my study and garner buy-in. As I was reaching out to students via emails, text messages,
and phone calls, he also allowed me to send him Instagram posts with information about the
study as yet another avenue of participant outreach.
In total, I conducted 31 interviews with 23 students (see Table 1). Of the 23 participants,
all students lived in Los Angeles and 14 (61%) mentioned specifically growing up in South
Central. Compared to other regions, South Central has a very particular place-based history of
unique dynamics among Black and Brown communities, a variety of youth-based community
organizations, and racialized political events that have had local and national implications
(Pastor et al., 2016; Rosas, 2019). Thus, Latinx students who grew up in South Central may have
a different sense of their identity given the history of Latinx populations integrating into a
traditionally African American place while facing collective disenfranchisement and surveillance
from government entities (Pastor et al., 2016; Rosas, 2019).
I interviewed nine students from the class of 2019 for phase 1 (see Table 2). I then
interviewed 14 students for phase two which included 10 students who remained enrolled at the
UCs and four who withdrew but had started their higher education trajectories at those
universities. For the final third phase, I follow up with eight of the nine original class of 2019
participants from phase 1. Interviews were done both in-person and over the phone and lasted
about 45 minutes. Participants were given a $10 Amazon gift card for each interview that they
participated in.
Table 1
Study Participants’ Demographic Profiles

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Pseudonym Age
Gender
Identity
Country/
Countries of
Origin1
First-
Generation
College
Student?2
(Y/N)
CPHS
Graduating
Class
Institution
(enrolled)
Institution
(current)
Alex 18 Man El Salvador Yes 2019 UCR UCR
Alexandria 18 Woman
Guatemala,
Mexico
Yes 2019 UCLA UCLA
Amber 20 Woman Mexico Yes 2017 UCI UCI
Andy 19 Woman Guatemala Yes 2018 UCLA UCLA
Courtney 21 Woman Guatemala Yes 2016 UCR UCR
Dolan 18 Woman Mexico Yes 2019 UCR UCR
Dwayne 18 Man Honduras No 2019 UCI UCI
Elon 21 Man Guatemala Yes 2017 UCI UCI
Emma 18 Woman Mexico Yes 2019 UCR UCR
Frida 18 Woman Mexico Yes 2019 UCLA UCLA
Hamilton 21 Man
El Salvador,
Mexico
Yes 2016 UCR
Riverside
City College
Holden 18 Man Guatemala Yes 2018 UCR UCR
James 19 Man
El Salvador,
Guatemala
Yes 2018 UCI UCI
Lydia 20 Woman
El Salvador,
Guatemala
Yes 2017 UCI
Biola
University
Max 19 Man Mexico Yes 2018 UCI UCI
Mike 21 Man El Salvador Yes 2017 UCI UCI
Mina 20 Woman
El Salvador,
Mexico
Yes 2017 UCI UCI
Natalie 21 Woman Mexico Yes 2016 UCR
Los Angeles
Trade
Technical
College

1 Participants were asked, “where are your parents from?” to determine their country or countries of origin.
2 Participants designated as “first-generation college students” indicated the following statement as true- “I may
have siblings who have graduated from college, but neither of my parents earned a 4-year, college degree in the
U.S.”

59

Pablo 20 Man Mexico Yes 2018 UCI
Los Angeles
Southwest
College
Paul 19 Man Guatemala Yes 2018 UCR UCR
Vanessa 18 Woman Mexico Yes 2019 UCLA UCLA
Vida 18 Woman Mexico Yes 2019 UCI UCI
Yayo 18 Man Mexico Yes 2019 UCR UCR

Table 2
Study Participants’ Interview Participation
Pseudonym
CPHS
Graduating
Class
Institution
(enrolled)
Institution
(current)
Phase 1
Participant?
(Y/N)
Phase 2
Participant?
(Y/N)
Phase 3
Participant?
(Y/N)
Alex 2019 UCR UCR Y N N
Alexandria 2019 UCLA UCLA Y N Y
Amber 2017 UCI UCI N Y N
Andy 2018 UCLA UCLA N Y N
Courtney 2016 UCR UCR N Y N
Dolan 2019 UCR UCR Y N Y
Dwayne 2019 UCI UCI Y N Y
Elon 2017 UCI UCI N Y N
Emma 2019 UCR UCR Y N Y
Frida 2019 UCLA UCLA Y N Y
Hamilton 2016 UCR
Riverside City
College
N Y N
Holden 2018 UCR UCR N Y N
James 2018 UCI UCI N Y N
Lydia 2017 UCI
Biola
University
N Y N
Max 2018 UCI UCI N Y N
Mike 2017 UCI UCI N Y N
Mina 2017 UCI UCI N Y N

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Natalie 2016 UCR
Los Angeles
Trade
Technical
College
N Y N
Pablo 2018 UCI
Los Angeles
Southwest
College
N Y N
Paul 2018 UCR UCR N Y N
Vanessa 2019 UCLA UCLA Y N Y
Vida 2019 UCI UCI Y N Y
Yayo 2019 UCR UCR Y N Y

Informed Consent
Upon receiving Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval (see Appendix A), I provided
all participants with the informed consent form (see Appendix B) at the beginning of the
demographic survey (see Appendix C) they needed to complete prior to their interview. While
participants were only required to read it, I wanted to make sure they were aware of the study
details, so I asked them to electronically sign their names at the bottom of the consent form
within the Google survey to confirm that they reviewed the information. At the beginning of
every interview, I provided a brief summary of the scope of the study and asked if they had any
questions before I began audio recording. All participants said “no,” except for one student who
wanted to learn more about the research process, which we then discussed until all of his
questions were addressed. I also reminded participants that they could request to “pass” any
questions they did not want to answer and had the right to stop the interview at any time. Only
one student asked to “pass” a question about their family and their arrival to the United States.
Data Analysis
Upon conducting the individual interviews, I had the audio recordings transcribed by
professional transcription companies. When I received the word documents of the transcriptions,

61

I read them and made edits- especially based on details specific to the local Los Angeles context,
the high school, or the college campus that a transcriber may not catch. I then used the
qualitative data management program, NVivo 12, to organize my data. Once I uploaded each
transcript, I created a “case” that represented each individual labeled by the pseudonym they
chose to ensure anonymity. For each case, I used their responses on the demographic survey to
fill in their self-identified “case classification” for attributes including race/ethnicity, gender,
status as a first-generation college student or not, and their associated college campus.
Grounded theory requires that data is analyzed iteratively so that early data collection can
inform later data gathering (Charmaz, 2006). Given such guidelines, I collected and analyzed
data in chunks. After I conducted an interview, I created a summary memo within 24 hours that
included any details that I recalled about the interview setting, any notable dynamics with the
interviewee, and general notes about what they shared in their responses. At the close of the
more detailed field note memo, I wrote a few lines that offered the general themes of the
students’ responses as well as some lingering questions that remained given our conversation.
After conducting about 3-5 interviews, depending on the timing in proximity to one another, I
wrote an analytical memo that drew connections or noted differences among students’ responses,
often based on the general themes I posed at the end of the individual memos. These analytical
memos were most helpful in thinking about slight adjustments to the interview protocols and
were especially useful for creating the protocol for the following phase of data collection as well
as engaging the coding process including open, axial, and selective procedures (Corbin &
Strauss, 1990).
In terms of the coding process, my initial coding began with looking at fragments of data
such as words, sentences, and incidents that students shared (Charmaz, 2006). Some of these data

62

fragments were indicative of in vivo codes, given that they illuminated participants’ worries,
challenges, and the advice they wanted to share with future alumni as a result of their
experiences (Charmaz, 2017). In alignment with an open coding process where one compares
data for the purpose of determining what is and what is not understood (Kolb, 2012), this process
helped me create over 30 different codes, also known as “nodes,” in the NVivo program. Initial
codes garnered from the open coding process included codes/nodes such as school discipline,
professionalism, gentrification, CPHS social life, and career interests. Some of the codes/nodes
that were most present included: race/ethnicity dynamics, family, challenging experiences, and
CPHS curriculum.
My second phase of the process involved axial coding where I considered the
relationships among codes (Cho & Lee, 2014; Kolb, 2012). Part of this procedure included
labeling some codes as categories and other codes as subcategories. For example, within the
largest category of “racial/ethnic dynamics,” I created subcategories based on time and location
such as “CPHS racial/ethnic dynamics” and “college racial/ethnic dynamics.” I then broke down
the college dynamics into the two areas where students mentioned experiencing them most
explicitly- “cultural orientation” and “cultural clubs.” Not all “college racial/ethnic dynamics”
codes fit into these “cultural orientation” and “cultural clubs” subcategories, but they served as
useful organizing structures for most of the students’ comments.
The final coding phase, selective coding, involved looking at core categories and
determining their relationships with other categories to inform a theoretical story. This process
allowed me to consider gaps in extant theories and how the data from this study might be related
to one another to inform theoretical propositions that could be further explored. This stage
helped me determine the core pieces of my theoretical model focused on the central

63

phenomenon: the transition to college for Latinx, urban charter school graduates. Selective
coding also helped me illuminate the causal and intervening conditions and how they informed a
particular consequence. I explore each of these grounded theory elements in detail in the
following findings chapter.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness from the perspective of grounded theory requires systematic approaches
to the data collection and analysis processes. A combination of my detailed field notes and
analytical memos helped contextualize how, when, and why data were collected. Throughout the
three phases of data analysis, my goal was to work towards “conceptual density” which requires
that the determined categories are theoretically dense with relationships among them that create
strong linkages (Cho & Lee, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 1990). Though I started the open coding
process with broad codes such as “CPHS school discipline,” the axial and selective processes
that followed connected the category to specific policies such as uniforms and the
merits/demerits system, and then established relationships to concepts related to control, respect,
and professionalism.
Since extant theory did not address charter schools as a socializing mechanism like they
did other types of high schools, like traditional public schools and private schools (Jack, 2019;
Khan, 2010), I used theories from related concepts such as neoliberalism, meritocracy, and
capital. Similarities and diversions from these theories helped inform a new model based on
participants’ experiences and reflections. To ensure triangulation, I used various sources of data
(Cho & Lee, 2014) to inform these theoretical propositions. To do so, I analyzed publicly
available data from CPHS’ website and social media accounts to inform how they described their

64

approach to education and their commitment to college preparation to members of the public-
especially prospective families.
Limitations
While I am confident that this study contributes to addressing a significant gap in
education’s current understanding of urban charter school graduates and their college
experiences, like all studies, there are limitations that should be noted. The first is based on the
timing of this study. While the focus is on the transition to college, participants’ socialization for
college turned out to be an important factor in the transition process. As such, future work might
consider a more longitudinal view of students’ experiences that can span from high school
through college, rather than beginning in the summer prior to college as this study did.
Second, while I began this dissertation process interested in the experiences of both
Latinx and Black CPHS students, larger structures influenced my possible participants. Though
CPHS alumni attend a range of institutions, there is a very low number of Black students
attending UC campuses overall. Data indicate that only 4% of all UC students who enrolled in
the Fall of 2018 were Black (The Regents of the University of California, 2019). At the selected
UCI, UCLA, and UCR campuses in the 2017-2018 academic year, there were Black student
populations of 2%, 3%, and 4% respectively (Forbes, 2020). So even though 25% of the CPHS
students identify as Black, systemic factors related to a continued pattern of limited access to
these more competitive institutions for Black applicants, severely reduced the number of possible
Black participants. While this study, among many others, makes it clear Latinx students continue
to face systemic challenges related to access, especially in comparison to their representative
demographics in California (The Campaign for College Opportunity, 2018), future studies must
continue to investigate persistent barriers to UC campuses for Black students.

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Finally, though CPHS is an example of an urban charter school, the insights about this
particular school cannot be generalized to all urban charters. CPHS is one high school that is a
member of a larger charter management organization that oversees five other high schools. As
mentioned, CPHS has four classes of alumni, making it a fairly young school while some other
charters are celebrating 20-year milestones. Additionally, CPHS has a very particular educational
approach where they integrate online learning throughout their curricula. Though they share the
commitment to college preparation that categorizes many urban charters and have insights that
may be useful to other schools, their particular history and current context should be thoughtfully
considered in comparisons beyond this site.
Positioned In and Out of Urban Charters
As Zora Neale Hurston (1942), a famous Black American anthropologist and novelist,
once said, “research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a
seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell
therein.” Central to a critical constructivist approach to grounded theory, research necessitates
self-reflection on ones’ positionality. Positionality requires researchers to contemplate the
personal and professional experiences that bring us to the “formalized curiosity” we seek to
disentangle. What brings me to the study of the transition to higher education are my personal
experiences attending a traditional public high school in the suburbs outside of Boston. At this
school, I was tracked into honors and AP classes as one of very few students of color who were
given that opportunity while others were systematically excluded. While I developed an
understanding of how to live and learn in White-dominated spaces, I continued to feel out of
place as I transitioned to a predominantly White, liberal arts college.

66

Witnessing the ways that educational opportunities opened doors for me and shut them
for others, I committed my professional career to increasing college access and success for
minoritized groups. I first worked at an education non-profit where I helped Boston Public
School students apply to college and advised cohorts through college and towards graduation at
three local universities. Following my master’s program, I served as the Dean of College and
Career Advising at a freestanding charter school in Boston. I elected to work at an urban charter
school for two reasons. First, the school prided themselves on their social justice mission and
culturally responsive curriculum, allowing me to talk about college access through the lens of
institutional racism with my majority Black and Latinx students while providing them and their
families with individualized guidance throughout the process. Second, the charter hiring
structure did not require me to have a counseling credential which was ideal as I was unsure at
the time about how much longer I wanted to continue working in the direct-service, college
counseling profession.
The three years I spent in the dean role were the most rewarding and the most challenging
experiences I have ever encountered. I felt inspired and validated in the parts of our school
community that valued the Black and Brown experiences of students and staff, and I
simultaneously felt that policies that aligned with no-excuses models inhibited all of us. Former
graduates would often return to our high school sharing their college experiences, some good and
some bad, but their most consistent sentiments were that they felt inadequate in their classrooms
and isolated in the social environment of college. I enrolled in my current doctoral program
seeking clarity on what my students were experiencing and what could be done to better support
them. I believe that my prior experiences serve as assets for this project. I am familiar with the
work of some charter schools intimately through my professional participation and I also know

67

that their structures and practices require thoughtful critique. Some of education’s most profound
works come from individuals who are personally connected and involved with the research
topics they aim to examine (Garcia, 2017; Khan, 2010), and I hope to contribute similarly
reflective and insightful contributions through this dissertation.
Summary of the Grounded Theory Research Process
This chapter reviewed the grounded theory methodological approach and how it informed
the research process and decision-making for this dissertation study. While there are some
quantitative studies looking at the college outcomes for charter school graduates, there is almost
no work related to developing a qualitative understanding of these students’ transition and
experiences in college. Since extant research has considered these transitional processes for
graduates of private and public high schools (Jack, 2019; Khan, 2010), grounded theory is a
strong methodological fit given a lack of understanding of these preparation and socialization
experiences for charter school alumni. Using grounded theory, which emphasizes the importance
of following the data, I have focused on the voices of Latinx urban charter alumni to learn
directly from them about their high school and college experiences. This study focuses on the
graduates of one urban, charter high school in Los Angeles. Given the growing presence of
charters across California and the large enrollment of Latinx students in these urban charters, in
particular, the focus on Latinx students can provide useful insights. Since I wanted to understand
how CPHS students transitioned to demographically different campuses, I looked at Latinx
students’ transitions to three UC campuses that varied greatly from the 80% Latinx student
composition at CPHS. This chapter concluded with the strategies employed to support the
trustworthiness of the study and consideration of my researcher positionality informed by my
prior and current experiences, role in the study as the sole researcher, and reflexive analysis of

68

how these elements work together to inform the contributions of the study and areas for future
work.
Though the details are explained further in the following findings chapter, the central
phenomenon that guides this study is a focus on the college transition. The causal conditions,
which are not to be confused with the use of the term “causal” in quantitative work, refer to
important pre-high school experiences. The intervening conditions describe students’ CPHS
experiences that participants share. And as I will explore, I suggest that the consequence of
attending this urban charter school is that Latinx graduates develop a belief system aligned with
neoliberal meritocracy, which encourages them to grapple with, and ultimately accept, the
permanence of inequality as they engage in the college transition process.
Chapter 4
Findings
This findings chapter is based upon an analysis of the 31 total interviews that were
conducted with 23 CPHS alumni. As detailed in the previous chapter, the 31 interviews resulted
from three phases of data collection with CPHS alumni who enrolled at one of the three UC
campuses (UCI, UCLA, and UCR) following their high school graduation. To remain consistent
with the expectations of a critical constructivist approach to grounded theory (Charmaz, 2017;
Glaser & Strauss, 1967), I drew directly from participants’ perspectives and experiences to
construct an explanatory model of the college transition process for Latinx charter school
graduates. This chapter begins with an overview of the model, followed by a more detailed
exploration of its key parts including the central phenomenon, intervening conditions, causal
conditions, and consequences (Do & Schallert, 2004; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). I conclude with a
summary of the study’s main findings.

69

Presentation of the Explanatory Model
As mentioned, the key components of an explanatory model that are derived from
grounded theory inquiry include the central phenomenon, intervening conditions, causal
conditions, and consequences (Do & Schallert, 2004; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). The following
sections detail each of these parts of the model (see Figure 2). In grounded theory research, the
explanatory model uses the data to create a narrative about the relationships between human
experiences and institutional factors that inform theoretical explanations that future research can
continue to explore and expand upon (Laing & Robinson, 2003).
Figure 2
An Explanatory Model of the College Transition for Latinx, Charter Graduates

Central Phenomenon: The College Transition
Within the grounded theory approach, the central phenomenon describes the main focus
of the study by delimiting how this dynamic process occurs as a result of particular actions and

70

interactions (Do & Schallert, 2004). The central phenomenon behaves as a core category that
exists at the center of the coding processes, allowing the narrative to stem from the conditions
and consequences (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). For this study, the key phenomenon of interest is
the college transition process. I have elected to define the college transition broadly. Rather than
enforce a temporal limit that narrows in on the time period between high school graduation and
either college enrollment or persistence through the first year, I gathered the reflections and
experiences of CPHS alumni across their four classes of high school graduates. Through my
conversations with participants where I referenced the college transition, students responded
based on their own conceptions of this term. For many, the college transition referred to the
weeks, months, or even years when they did not feel fully acclimated to their college
environment. As suggested, all of the other parts of the model work in relation to strengthening
our understanding of the college transition process for Latinx students who graduate from urban
charter schools.
Causal Conditions: Pre-High School Experiences
Using a grounded theory approach, causal conditions do not use the term “causal” in the
same way that quantitative research does. From a quantitative perspective, causal refers to
randomized control trials where the randomization helps inform potential cause and effect
relationships. Causal, in this case, refers to conditions informed by particular constructs and
contexts that influence how a given event, the central phenomenon, occurs based on patterns
illuminated by the data (Do & Schallert, 2004; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Rather than stress rigid
relationships, contemporary approaches to grounded theory emphasize an interpretive
understanding of contextual conditions (Charmaz, 2006). Participants shared three main causal
conditions that they noted as impactful for how they engaged with the college transition process

71

later on in their educational trajectories. These pre-high school experiences included: (1)
important personal and familial events, (2) earlier educational environments, and (3) interactions
with communities from similar or different backgrounds. Though presented as distinct
constructs, all three of these conditions interact and mutually inform one another relationally by
influencing aspects of participants’ identities, experiences, and the impact of structural forces.
Important Personal and Familial Life Events
When asked about their families, neighborhoods, communities, and motivations for
pursuing college, participants mentioned significant experiences that informed who they are
today. For many students, such events were deeply personal. Almost 50% of participants
discussed the challenges faced by their family members, the second most common code. Emma,
a member of the Class of 2019 and a first-year student at UCR, discussed growing up in the
Crenshaw area of Los Angeles. Her parents were born in Mexico and she recalled her mother
being extremely protective of her, even to the point where she would not allow Emma to attend
the after school program that she wanted to join. Everything changed when Emma, the baby
among her older siblings, reached the fifth grade. As she describes in her own words:
My dad got deported, so that changed my family a lot. We went through financial
struggles. My mom had to pick up multiple jobs. They had to take out loans. I had to
really step in and support at the house because I couldn't work- I was a fifth-grader then.
So I had to really take part at homelife and making sure I was focused on that. So those
challenges aren't what a usual fifth-grader goes through. So, then I became more of an
outsider. So we had an after school program, and I remember I wanted to be in it since
kindergarten, but my mom would never let me until that happened because my mom
would get out of work until like six. So then I would have to stay after school and that
would be an everyday thing.

Emma was forced at a young age to experience an event that is unfortunately only growing more
commonplace- the deportation of a parent. Not only must this have been a devastating situation
to manage emotionally, but Emma noticed the financial burden it placed on her mother who

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needed to work more and take on debt. Rather than focus exclusively on school, friends, and fun
like a typical fifth-grader might, Emma needed to pick up responsibilities around the house since
she was not at an age yet when she could contribute by getting a job. While she did get to attend
the after school program, it was a decision that her mom was forced to make due to the immense
pressure she faced becoming a single parent caring for an entire family on her own. Even as
Emma grew to become a college student, her goal was to be an inspiration to her young
nephews. Wiping back tears, she shared:
My siblings only have AAs [associate’s degrees], so they don't do four years. So I want
to be the first in my family to do four-year college. My family really put a lot into me
because I was the baby. They really pushed me in my education. They didn't want me to
get a job because they wanted me to focus in school and push myself to be better … It's
like, to show appreciation and to be an aspiration to my little nephews because yeah, their
dad went to college, but at the same time, they're looking up at me in school. I didn't
really have that because all my siblings are out of school, so I didn't have that
comparison. I have a cousin who's a year younger than me. My auntie recently passed
away, so he doesn't have a mom. He's like a little brother to me. I grew up with him. I'm
always tutoring him if he needs help.

Emma has committed herself to not only serving as an example of someone who earns a four-
year, college degree to her family members but also dedicates her time to supporting them with
reaching their own educational milestones.
At least three student participants were either undocumented or had parents who were
undocumented. Elon, a member of the CPHS Class of 2017 and a junior at UCI, faced a similar
concern related to citizenship in a very intimate way. He arrived in the U.S. from Guatemala at
seven years of age as a Spanish-speaker. Though he lived in a community with others who
shared his cultural background, he still struggled to adjust to both the English language and the
American lifestyle. Coming to the U.S. in search of more affordable educational opportunities,
Elon found a lot of support from family, friends, and educators as he learned to read and write in
English. Yet, when the college process began, Elon faced numerous challenges as a result of his

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status as an undocumented applicant. The myriad ways that undocumented students face
systemic barriers as they seek access to and success in higher education institutions was perhaps
the most important challenge that Elon faced in the college transition. He mentioned
experiencing difficulties with the application and financial aid processes but acknowledged that
being a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient was immensely helpful,
especially compared to those who were not given this opportunity to defer deportation or benefit
from the eligibility to work. Elon’s parents did not have this exemption and he shared that a year
and a half prior to our interview, they were both detained by immigration. He describes the
ramifications of that experience:
… so that sort of led me to go in a spiral of some depression and anxieties and a lot of
things and I wasn't performing well in school … They were detained for a short period of
time, but right now we're still waiting for the judge to decide whether they're going to be
able to stay here or not. So there's still at home right now, but there's always that
lingering situation whether they're going to be able to stay here or they have to go back.

Throughout his life thus far, Elon and his family have had to manage the stresses and anxieties
that come with being undocumented, which are especially worrisome in the current anti-
immigrant, political climate under the Trump administration. As a young child, he mostly
worried about learning the language and adjusting to the culture, but serious concerns arose as he
embarked upon the college application process. Even as he transitioned into a college student,
the concerns related to the ability of his parents to stay in the U.S. linger in his mind among the
numerous college-related responsibilities that he must carry.
Earlier Educational Environments
In addition to managing challenging personal circumstances, participants also discussed
attending a variety of elementary and middle schools with varying degrees of positive and
negative experiences. Seventeen of the 23 participants attended either traditional public or

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charter public elementary and middle schools, while a handful attended magnet or private
schools prior to CPHS. Students often reflected upon the extent to which they felt prepared or
not for the academic expectations of the CPHS curriculum based on their prior educational
experiences. They also mentioned former teachers as integral factors to their development.
In speaking about their elementary and middle schools, some participants shared positive
experiences. Natalie, a graduate of the Class of 2016, remembered all the way back to her
elementary school teachers.
So my elementary and middle school, they were public schools, and I really liked my
experience in elementary because, well, just the teachers were really nice. I’ve always
had all my good memories come from elementary because of teachers. They were just
more involved with the students.

Like Natalie, many students thought about teachers when they reflected upon their early
education memories. Vida, a member of the Class of 2019, had a positive recollection of her
charter middle school experience after transferring from a traditional public middle school after
the first week:
I transitioned to the charter school and it was so different. Everybody was so welcoming.
The classes were smaller. Teachers had more one-on-ones that I didn't see back in the
middle school that was my local school. And I feel like overall the charter school did help
me a lot as a student. I was able to be more social. I improved a lot on reading because
we had a reading count. Reading count is a way that you read every week and then you
test on the book. So it was very helpful for me. And just overall I feel like the charter
school was very good.

As someone who described herself as struggling with reading at a young age, Vida appreciated
being in a smaller learning environment where she could see her own academic growth.
Other participants shared early educational experiences that should make us all shudder at
the thought that such events would happen in schools today. Emma, who was mentioned
previously when describing the impact of her father’s deportation, discussed attending a charter
school from kindergarten through 8th grade that was part of a charter management organization

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facing serious concerns. She recalled her middle school did not have enough money for soap in
the bathrooms, leaving students to rinse their hands with water and then use sanitizer when they
returned to class. In addition to this serious health concern, Emma also remembers not having
full-time teachers for some periods of time, which had a noticeable impact on her academics.
I think the first time I experienced not having a teacher, I did notice my test-taking went
down because I remember at the time we took benchmarks in fourth grade. And then
when I had my ... His name was Mr. Roberts. When I had Mr. Roberts, I was high [on the
distribution of test scores]. And then when I didn't have a teacher for a couple months and
then we got the second teacher, I went from advanced to basic because we weren't really
learning content. We had substitutes. They would just give us packets and be like, "Okay.
Complete it." It wasn't like they were actually teaching us.

Not only was Emma falling behind with inconsistent substitute instruction, but she also
remembers unsafe interactions between instructors and students.
I remember one of the substitutes got in trouble because he grabbed one of the students
and used them as an eraser on the whiteboard. I remember that vividly … Now I'm just
like, he shouldn't have. Then I knew he shouldn't have done that … So my peers would
just think it's funny because he's using him as an eraser. I'm just like, "No."

Emma recognized even at a young age that something was wrong. Years later, the charter
school’s founder was charged with embezzling millions of dollars in school funds. Andy, a Class
of 2018 graduate and a UCLA student, described her charter middle school in the following way:
Education-wise I just, I remember that I based on, like, now and the education I’m
receiving now, the education I was receiving back then, I just personally don’t think they
really pushed us much, yeah, so – (laughs) … I guess the fact that when I hear students in
school or in class saying like, “oh, I learned this in middle school and I remember” – I
don’t remember a single thing about that, literally just learning about it now in college.

For Andy, she feels as if she is still catching up on foundational knowledge related to “basic
math,” like algebra and geometry, many years later as a college student.
The combination of negative experiences ranging from feeling that they had not been
adequately prepared or were not provided adequate resources in their respective elementary and
middle school environments mattered for how students later approached the central

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phenomenon- the college transition. Their earlier educational experiences impacted their
perceptions of their own readiness for high school and later, college. Additionally, given the
range of school types and the experiences students shared, their statements made it clear that
there was nothing inherently better or worse about attending a traditional public school or a
charter school. Though students held varied beliefs about the potential differences in quality,
their experiences overall did not anecdotally indicate a consistent trend among participants’
elementary and middle schools. Much of this diversity of thought mirrors trends in the research
that do not indicate a clear and consistent difference between the quality and performance of
TPSs and charter schools (Epple et al., 2016; Shin et al., 2017).
Interactions with Others from Similar and Different Backgrounds
Broader, structural forces that have informed current patterns of residential and school
segregation have influenced a trend shared by many study participants: living in racially
segregated neighborhoods and attending racially segregated schools. CPHS alumni discussed the
racial/ethnic and class makeup of their residential communities as well as their elementary and
middle schools when describing their pre-high school experiences.
Many students grew up in majority Latinx communities. Dwayne, a UCI first-year and
member of the Class of 2019, had actually looked up the demographics of East L.A. where he
grew up and said it was 90% Latinx. A fellow member of the Class of 2019 and a student at
UCLA, Frida, noted a bit more diversity in her neighborhood. As she describes it, “Okay, so I
grew up in South Central. I still live there, and it was predominantly Latino people, Chicano,
some African Americans, and there was one White person on my block.” Participants also
mentioned that they attended majority Latinx schools. Frida’s roommate at UCLA, Alexandria,
was one of the few CPHS alumni to have experienced private school education. She described

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her private, Catholic elementary and middle schools as “Latino, just Latino.” This matched
Pablo’s private, Catholic school experience with a student body he described as “100% Latinos.”
Max, a Class of 2018 graduate attending UCI, described who he was surrounded by in his
traditional public elementary and charter middle schools as,
Okay, so my elementary and middle school I think we were all on the same – like the
lower side of the socioeconomic status. And most of us only grew up with Hispanics and
Blacks. That’s all I ever grew up with. It was the only, like, group I was – I stuck with,
the only group I saw.

Almost 80% of participants described their neighborhoods as being made up of Latinx and Black
residents and 16 of the 23 participants mentioned attending majority Latinx and Black
elementary and middle schools. Given these racially segregated residential and educational
experiences in addition to the fact that they all attended CPHS which is a majority Latinx high
school, some participants stated that college would be the first time they might share classrooms
and residence halls with individuals from other backgrounds. Hamilton, a graduate from the
Class of 2016 who attended UCR for two years and then left due to mental health concerns, was
particularly aware of how his experiences being around others from similar backgrounds caused
him to feel culture shock and anxiety when he started college. As he recalls:
So like going from Latinx students and all that other stuff to a UC campus I would say it
was pretty interesting because I did notice like a majority of people here who are, like, of
Asian nationality, a lot of White – not many like African-American or Latino students,
which is pretty interesting. I guess that’s kind of what contributed to my social anxiety
because I guess since we’re coming from a place where you know everybody and how
they roll and basically knowing that they live in the same circumstances – like, almost the
same circumstances that we live – a lot of us came from, like, ghetto (laughs) areas.

While acknowledging that “ghetto” is a heavily racialized term, Hamilton’s experience
exemplifies one extreme of the spectrum in terms of the possible consequences of segregated
school and neighborhood conditions. For some students who grow up in predominantly Latinx
and Black educational systems and communities, they can feel discomfort when they must

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transition into college environments. Such spaces can be very different, triggering emotions
related to culture shock (Jack, 2014) and stereotype threat (Logel et al.,, 2012; Steele & Aronson,
1995) that can lead to anxiety. This very important topic of campus racial climates is explored in
greater detail in the section that follows the consequences of a neoliberal meritocracy perspective
on the college transition process.
Though less common, other participants had a few unique experiences that helped them
develop comfort with people from non-Latinx backgrounds. Extracurricular programs are one
example of pathways to such opportunities. UCLA first-year, Alexandria, lived in the primarily
low-income, Latinx and Black area of South Central and attended an entirely Latinx Catholic,
private school. Yet, during the summer of her junior year at CPHS, she was accepted into a
college-preparation program organized by and located on a local, private university campus.
Described as a program for high-achieving, low-income students, Alexandria shared in our first
interview that she remembered meeting peers from across the state and the country: “I had four
roommates, one of them was from the Valley, another one came from New Jersey, and another
one came from Michigan. So it's like, all over the states.” When we spoke again after she
completed her first quarter of college, she mentioned that this summer experience helped her
with the transition to college. According to Alexandria, “That [program] also helped me a lot. A
lot of different students that didn’t look like me and how to just, like – and just having that – that
– just being in that environment helped a lot.”
Coming from a majority Latinx and Black neighborhood and attending majority Latinx
and Black schools where she could only identify one White and one Asian classmate throughout
elementary and middle school, Emma also had a fairly racially and ethnically segregated
experience. Later in her high school career, Emma participated in two programs on university

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campuses in the northeast for students interested in studying medicine. During her most recent
experience at a well-known ivy league institution, Emma met peers from diverse backgrounds
but noticed the importance of the intersection of race and class from this experience. As
described in her own words,
I know I've been in a situation, like when I went to [northeast city] last time when I did
the [ivy league institution] thing … My uncle's friend knew the lady who made the
program. And the program was $2,000, and even with the scholarship, it's still, like,
another $1,000 … So everyone there in my group, they went to private schools. Even if
they went to a public school, it was a wealthy public school. They played lacrosse, which
you don't see here … And I was like, "Okay, I don't even know how to play lacrosse.” I
didn't even know what that was so being in that situation I felt awkward. Because yes,
there were Asians there. There were other minority students there, but they weren't really
minorities because they had money. Once money comes into play, you're not really seen
as a racial spectrum, you're seen by the money.

As Emma recollects this event, she points out an element that is often left unsaid when
discussing racial segregation, which is the common intersection of class. Even though Emma
was able to meet students from different backgrounds through this program, she felt
disconnected from what she imagined were distinct experiences for minoritized individuals from
a more privileged economic class.
In summary, the causal conditions refer to (1) important personal and familial events, (2)
earlier educational environments, and (3) interactions with communities from similar or different
backgrounds based upon both racial/ethnic and class demographics. As detailed through the
voices and memories of the participants, one can better understand how experiences prior to, or
outside of, attending CPHS inform this study’s central phenomenon: the college transition
process.
Intervening Conditions: College-Preparatory, Urban Charter School Culture
In comparison to causal conditions that influence the occurrence of the central
phenomenon, intervening conditions describe contexts and constructs that either facilitate or

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constrain how the central phenomenon is approached (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007; Corbin &
Strauss, 1990). In the case of this study, the intervening conditions describe the shared high
school context and its related constructs that inform how students understand and engage in the
college transition process. While one would imagine that all aspects of a students’ high school
experience relate to how they transition to college, this finding focuses on three key constructs
that students described as particularly important for their college-readiness. In describing the
dynamics of CPHS’ college-ready charter school culture, the three areas that appeared to matter
most to students include the academic curriculum, the development of “college knowledge,” and
practices related to the no-excuses discipline policy.
Academic Curriculum
As mentioned when describing CPHS, the school is part of a CMO that emphasizes
personal learning educational approaches. As a result, the curriculum at CPHS is based mostly,
but not exclusively, on virtual modules. Students work from personal laptop computers in
flexibly organized classrooms with movable chairs and desks that allow for both independent
and group study. Students can work at their own pace and teachers can monitor their progress. In
terms of this online pedagogical approach, participants largely reflected positively upon their
experiences. Like Mike, a graduate of the Class of 2017 and current UCI student, shared upon
when describing his academic experience:
Okay, so before [CPHS] I was actually – I wasn’t the best student. I was pretty much
always behind on homework. I don’t know. I just – I wasn’t really inspired I guess to
anything. But, like, [CPHS] allowed me to work at my own pace, and I kind of – I feel
like I liked that a lot because I ended up finishing a lot of the work very early so it
allowed me to, like, focus on other classes or maybe extracurriculars, things like that.

The flexible, student-driven curricular approach helped motivate Mike academically, thus
shifting his prior self-identification as someone who “wasn’t the best student.”

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Participants also noted areas where they felt the technical approach to learning did not
necessarily translate to the skills needed for college academics. For example, a UCI student and
member of the Class of 2017, Amber, shared that she struggled with how different the module
approach was compared to the quarter system at her university.
Well, comparing you know, the curriculum I’ve had, like, throughout my schooling
years, I want to say it was a good curriculum. I feel like it did prepare me for college in a
sense. But there were a few aspects that I felt that didn’t prepare me for college.

Amber details further,
I mean, not all the teachers but some of the teachers started to implement the syllabus,
you know, aspect of a course, and I feel like if that would have been implemented since,
like, freshman year or something like I feel like I – it would have helped me in college,
because I don’t know. At first I felt like from high school and college, there’s a big
difference. You know, the way that, especially at Irvine since it’s a quarter system,
everything goes by really fast and I don’t know, maybe I thought that it would have been
great that at least for seniors to have curriculum -- what’s it called? Have curriculum,
like, set up like a college course in the sense that, you know, here you have your syllabus,
you know, and move on like that. Maybe not like a quarter system, but like a semester
system just so students could have the idea of what college is like.

Here, Amber offers that she struggled with the transition from self-directed modules to college
courses with syllabi and quarter system schedules. She offers a potential solution where teachers
who lead senior courses could get their students acclimated to the college structure. As she
mentions in the beginning, she thought that CPHS had a good curriculum, especially compared
to her earlier educational experiences. Yet, she believes there are ways the curriculum can shift
as students near graduation to better mirror the academic environment in college.
Phase 1 and Phase 3 participants who were members of the Class of 2019 shared
particularly useful insights. In their Phase 1 interviews, which occurred prior to enrolling in
college, they expressed confidence in their academic preparation. When asked if he felt prepared
for college, Dwayne responded with assurance, “Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty confident in that I can
go in and do what I have to do. I'm pretty sure if anything comes up that I will be able to handle

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it. If not, I will ask for help.” Frida, a prospective UCLA student at the time, agreed with
Dwayne when she responded similarly to the same question stating that, “In terms of academics
and all that, I feel really prepared.” Participants also believed that developing familiarity with
technology through the module-based curriculum would be helpful for transitioning to college.
As UCR student, Yayo, shared in his first interview,
I think it's a good thing, just because you don't waste a lot of paper. A lot of its online and
you get used to the modern world of, like, a lot of homework is online, typing and stuff
like that. Especially for low-income students, if we were still using paper and then we go
to a UC system where a lot of people take notes on computers and stuff like that and we
don't know how to? That just would put us at a great disadvantage. So, having technology
implemented into our curriculum, it'll help us in the future.

Yayo viewed access to technology as an issue of equity for low-income students and their
eventual transition to college.
By Phase 3, after they had completed their first quarter of college, they developed more
nuanced insights about the areas of the CPHS curriculum that were translatable to a college
context and the areas that should be improved upon. Though first-year students like Dwayne and
Frida were quite confident about their academic preparation for college based on the CPHS
curriculum, they shared insights about their academic challenges once they experienced their
initial transition as college students. Dwayne felt prepared by CPHS for his college literature
course after reaching out for feedback from the writing center but felt less prepared for
economics.
Economics actually, I don't think I was prepared for economics. I think that was
something that was only a little bit in the high school curriculum. It was different. It's not
really exactly what you learned. What I learned was more... It was just more in-depth
with mathematics and applications, like, to the real world.

While it was likely helpful for Dwayne to have had some previous experience with the topic, his
college course required a more in-depth analysis. For Alexandria, a UCLA first-year student, she

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felt very positive and gave CPHS an 8 out of 10 rating in terms of how prepared she felt by them
for college. Though Amber, who graduated two years before Alexandria, felt ill-prepared with
understanding college syllabi, Alexandria saw them used in many of her CPHS courses. While
she did not struggle to understand the deadlines, she did share concerns about her study skills.
The only thing that was a little difficult for me was studying because at [CPHS] for tests
we were given study guides and, you know, this is what you’re going to be tested on, and
yeah, for some of my classes they give us, “oh this is what you’re tested on,” but not all
of them gave study guides. So creating a study guide for myself was something new that I
had to do. Talking to the people in my classes about how they’re doing that, how they’re
prepared for midterms and finals, like, that was different as well.

Here, Alexandria points out that CPHS teachers often provided study guides for exams. When
she did not have this resource for some of her classes, she was unsure of what to do. Yet,
Alexandria, like Dwayne with his literature course and the writing center, knew she should reach
out for help. Reaching out for advice from peers is not only a helpful skill but it also indicates
college knowledge related to navigating resources for the purposes of personal and academic
success in higher education institutions, as explored in the next section.
College Knowledge
In addition to providing a rigorous, college-ready curriculum and academic skills, CPHS
also provides its students with access to college knowledge. College knowledge refers to, “the
information and skills that allow students to successfully navigate the complex college
admissions and financial aid processes, as well as develop an understanding of college norms
and culture” (p. 190, Roderick et al., 2009). College knowledge includes understanding the
details of the college application and financial aid processes needed to search, apply, afford, and
enroll at an institution. College knowledge also refers to familiarity with particular college-
specific terminology, such as “office hours” and the “bursar's office,” as well as related
navigational skill sets about how to find and use such resources. At CPHS, students develop

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college knowledge most explicitly through the college readiness course. They take this year-long
course in their senior year with the school’s college advisor and alumni advisor who cover the
application processes as well as navigational skill sets.
In terms of the application and financial aid processes, students mostly shared that they
found the college-readiness course to be extremely helpful. Vanessa, a UCLA first-year offered,
I guess the college readiness, like, I guess that really helped. I kinda liked that I guess the
counselors really help you out with your applications and we actually explained it really
well cause me as a first-gen I was like, “What is this?” “What's the Common App?” Um,
I really liked that about them, how they had a class specifically for that.

When referencing the early parts of the college research process, Vanessa’s fellow UCLA
classmate and roommate, Frida, shared,
We took a class on it. So I had college readiness, that's what it was called. And every
week, it was the new topic. So we would learn about Cal States or privates or UC. So I
learned about it through class.

Related to the financial aid process, Dwayne, a UCR first-year, expanded upon how these tasks
fit into the format of the class,
[The college counselor] had slides with big arrows, "You're going to do this first, read the
account. You're going to have another file in your Google Drive where you're going to
save your password and username and you're going to collect everything" and so it was
like that.

The course instructors maintained the online, module format of other CPHS courses, but made
each step of the college application process an assignment for students to complete by particular
deadlines. Assignments related to completing the Common Application and the FAFSA, key
forms in the college and financial aid processes, helped the majority first-generation student
body, like Vanessa.

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Once students applied to colleges, were granted financial aid packages, and made their
final decision about where they planned to enroll, the remainder of the college readiness course
covered topics about the college transition. As Vanessa describes it,
The second semester where [the college readiness course] was more of, like, college
well-being. So I don't know if other schools are like that, but I really appreciated that.
Cause it's good to have that talk now instead of being just lost when you are in college.

In addition to covering topics about well-being, the alumni counselor who led this college
transition section of the course covered other topics that he hoped would help students navigate
college campuses. Prior to enrolling in college at UCR, Dolan expressed confidence in her
academic preparation related to her familiarity with office hours, syllabi, and reaching out for
help.
When it comes to academics, at some point I did struggle to somehow try to actually
understand a subject and stuff like that. And I know how to go about it. I know I really
like going to office hours all the time. And that's something [CPHS] does all the time.
And it's really great because, I mean, college has that. And you could really take good use
of that. And yeah, it's just so much. When it comes to academics, I know how to reach
out to my professor. And I learned what a syllabi is. And actually checking what it has
and what I have to do. Yeah, so I feel like I know how to go about it, but I don't know
what to expect.

Here, Dolan shares that since she learned how to manage academic challenges at CPHS, she
feels ready to do so in college since she thinks the structures are similar. When we reconnected
for her second interview following her first quarter at UCR, Dolan found the note-taking skills
she developed in her AP classes at CPHS to be useful for college.
I think when it comes to the notes area, I think [CPHS] prepared us pretty. Well, at least
myself. I think I make pretty decent notes and I try not to write everything the professor
is saying and stuff like that. I think that's something that really helped because of lectures
I would have in some of my AP classes or even non-AP classes, I was able to catch on
and not focus on one thing and stuff like that.

Though she found her preparation with note-taking to be applicable to the college environment,
she notes that her high school’s choice to not use textbooks became a challenge.

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It was just a little different when it comes to presentations the way they would explain
certain things and also referring to a textbook and stuff like that. Because I guess my
classes in [CPHS], they would maybe take text from textbooks and put it in a
presentation, but college was like, no you have information in the presentation but you
still have to read the textbook. I think that was a little... I thought I was going to get away
with that. I was like, "I don't have to read the textbook, it's fine." I think that's maybe the
thing that I really did struggle with.

Though CPHS provided their most recent graduates with an understanding of how to use a
syllabus and engage with professors in office hours, alumni still struggled with other elements of
the academic transition, including the use of textbooks.
Another topic that alumni from the Class of 2019 discussed included mental health
services in college. During the 2018-2019 academic year, the CPHS college department had an
intern who helped the college counselor and the alumni counselor with supporting seniors.
Emma described how the intern’s advice informed her of resources she might not be aware of
otherwise:
I know one of the interns who was here, she said that she didn't really think she needed
the mental health facilities at her campus, and then she decided, she saw that she was
paying for them. She was like, "Well, if they're taking it out of my tuition, I might as well
go for it." So I think that's something that a lot of us don't see.

Here, the intern tries to normalize the use of such resources not only for personal reasons but also
financially- reminding students that they may as well as use them since they are paying for it
anyway. Emma notes how important this was for her given the stigma that many communities of
color carry related to mental health. A graduate from the previous Class of 2018 and current UCI
student, James, wishes he could have learned more about mental health when he was a CPHS
student.
I think the one thing they should focus on the most, it would be mental health probably
just a little bit more because it’s a big deal once you’re here. You know, I feel like that’s
what affects a lot of people here. I feel like [the college and alumni counselors] should
probably just focus on how easy it is, you know, to, like, let yourself slip because it does
happen, you know? So I feel like some students might not be prepared for that because I

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mean, a lot of students – or a lot of people that I’ve talked to at UCI, you know, they have
a turnaround phase. So I feel like a lot of students struggle through that, and it’s better
just to prepare them a little bit more.

Both Emma’s appreciation and James’ desire for further discussion about mental health as
students prepare for college highlight the importance of college readiness courses that examine
the college transition beyond academics, which most of the college knowledge literature focuses
on. In summary, the college readiness course was clearly valuable to CPHS graduates. The
course helped them complete the necessary college and financial aid application processes and in
the last year, has also focused on better preparing students with “college knowledge” related to
developing their familiarity with course syllabi and office hours. In addition to their appreciation
of these learning experiences, alumni also noted other areas that can be improved upon such as
their use of traditional textbooks and discussions about maintaining one’s mental health in
college.
“No Excuses” Disciplinary Policies
There are multiple elements that informed CPHS’s college-ready charter culture, such as
the academic curriculum and their commitment to developing students’ college knowledge as
described previously. Students also reflected upon the school’s no-excuses discipline system and
how it informed their preparation for the transition to college. “No-excuses” refers to:
… an approach to education that seeks to eliminate opportunity gaps facing youth from
oppressed racial and economic groups through an intensive college preparatory mission,
extended school day and year, strict disciplinary environment, intensive focus on
traditional mathematics and literacy skills, and reliance on direct instruction. The terms
no excuses refers to the commitment of educators in such schools not to accept social
forces such as poverty or racism as reasons for lowering expectations for what their
students can achieve. (Seider & Graves, 2020, p. 80-81)

As a fairly new school, CPHS experienced some significant, early transitions that informed their
school culture. Alumni from the earlier CPHS classes spoke to the constant changes they

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experienced by attending a new school. Natalie, from the Class of 2016 which was the first class
to ever attend and then graduate from CPHS, shared that the school was entirely different during
her freshman year compared to her sophomore year and beyond when the current charter
management organization (CMO) and its CEO took over.
So once [the new CEO of the CMO] came in everything started changing because the
first year, like, all the teachers were different. The principal was different, and it was just
the way the school was built, it was very different because the students were able to
choose their own schedule. They were able to decide what time we would, like, come in,
and what time we would leave. And then when [the new CEO of the CMO] came – Well,
a majority of the teachers were fired, and then [the new CEO of the CMO] got more
strict.

Natalie went on to describe what these changes meant for her academic experience as a high
school student and the insights she developed later as a college student.
But like [the new teachers] did encourage me or push me to do better in classes,
especially when like everything – everyone focuses on GPA at [CPHS], so everybody is
just like – all the students have a mindset like you have to get into a good university, so
it’s just everybody’s like, “oh, I’m not trying to be at the end of the line.” So I’m just
going to be – like, trying to improve, do homework, try to get AP classes and then you
just – it kind of helps you, but at the same time it just has a competitive mentality that it
doesn’t really work in college, because in college you’re just trying to work more with
other people to help each other, but at [CPHS] they built it like, “oh no, you have to get
into the university and you have to be at the best rank” and all of that.

For Natalie, she believed that the change in leadership shifted the culture of the school. She
acknowledged in our discussion that her grades and her focus were not ideal in her first year. At
the same time, she also struggled to see the point of the strict discipline system and the
competitive dynamics among students for the purpose of gaining acceptance to college. Another
member of the founding class, Hamilton, shared similar perspectives about the leadership
transition.
The system they had in place the first year was that you get to go home early if you get
there early, and obviously get all your work done, like, complete a certain amount of
modules and you get to go home … I know a lot of students did take advantage of the

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system because a lot of them live pretty far away, so the commute to [CPHS] in
downtown LA was pretty hard for them … So yeah, the first year was interesting. There
was a lot of disciplinary issues. There were certain students that would just constantly act
up. They would get in fights. They would walk out on teachers, talk back to them and I
just feel that the staff wasn’t prepared for what they got. (laughs) Like, they just were not
ready for us … And then [the new CEO of the CMO] came in as the CEO. He was
announced as CEO and at first since we’re so used to this chaotic scene we were in,
everyone was like, “who is this guy?” you know? … And yeah, we were a little worried,
but we were like, I guess it’s better than people fighting and causing a scene all the time.

When the new CPHS leadership made a transition in staff and school culture following that first
year, students noted there was a much firmer approach. Since then, the school emphasizes the
enforcement of two major components of the no-excuses disciplinary policy: (1) the merits and
demerits system and, (2) a strict uniform dress code. Participants largely spoke positively about
both elements, with a few nuanced critiques.
Demerits and… Merits
The school culture policy that has been utilized at some urban charter schools is referred
to as “merits and demerits,” where students are given points and incentives for positive behaviors
and lose points and face consequences for negative behaviors. Students mentioned that it was far
more likely at CPHS to lose points through demerits than to gain points through merits. As stated
by UCR senior, Courtney, “I feel like more merits should have been implemented, but they never
really did that.” Lydia, a Class of 2017 CPHS graduate had similar sentiments,
Okay, so when it came to merits, I feel like they weren’t very like good at giving those
out. (laughs) I think they were so much better at giving out demerits than merits, and
sometimes, like, when I would see my friends or something I’d scream out, “oh, she
deserves a merit!” but they never … But during the time that I was there, it was so rare
when you found somebody who got a merit. (laughs) And it was the same people getting
the most merits, you know? I think it was kind of, like, stereotyped in a way. Like, if they
just – they automatically assumed that this person is always a good student or whatever,
every time they do something good it’s always a merit, you know?

Not only were merits rare, but Lydia felt as if the few that were given out were given to the same
students. Alumni also explained other aspects of demerits, such as the reset system and the

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detention consequence. As James shares, “I believe it was every two weeks we would have a
reset of demerits that you have, and if you would reach four, you’d have detention for – it was on
Fridays for three hours.” Natalie describes detention further:
when you get demerits and then you get a detention, you’re not allowed to do anything
while you’re in detention, and it’s just – like, they give you so much work, and then yet
they’re throwing away so many hours just for you to sit down as a punishment. It’s like,
that doesn’t make sense.

As mentioned, the main consequence of getting too many demerits before your points reset is
having to serve a Friday detention for three hours when you are not allowed to do anything but
sit in the room. Alumni shared how this tedious element of detention served as a deterrent to
engaging with behaviors that would warrant this consequence, such as tardiness or dressing out
of alignment with the uniform policy. Holden, a UCR sophomore, shares, “I cared. That’s why I
never got detention. (laughs) because I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t want to come in or, like, stay
on a Friday or whatever. That would have sucked.” Students critiqued the demerit and merit
system for infrequently awarding merits, and when they did distribute such incentives, faculty
and staff seemed to give them to just a few students. They also shared concerns that the points
system was not reset often enough, at times leading to tedious and boring sessions of detention
on Fridays.
Yet, 61% of CPHS alumni who were interviewed reflected on this system positively as
being helpful to them and their peers in a variety of ways with the remainder sharing both pros
and cons. Alex, a UCR freshman, speaks about how the system informed students’ behaviors:
I mean, it was kind of helpful in a way because then it taught you how to be professional
in certain ways so then you can't be doing certain things at a certain time. You can't really
goof around certain really important things. So, they just taught you how to act.

Alex noticed how the discipline system taught students that there was a time and place for
particular actions and notes how learning when to goof around and when not to informs students’

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sense of professionalism. In terms of developing professional skills, students at CPHS were
expected to be able to introduce themselves to visitors, who might be potential donors, wanting
to observe their classrooms. Emma explains how the principal of CPHS would conduct
impromptu practice runs with students,
I think, as the older you get here at [CPHS], [the principal] would give you a demerit
because you're supposed to know it … It doesn't have to be perfect, but you have to get
through. I'll do an example: “Hello, my name's [Emma], we're currently in [Ms.
Kimani's] environmental science class. We're learning about the volcanic cycle and how
it helps with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What brings you to [CPHS]?” Or, “what's your
name?” And you would say to me your name … And you'd offer, "Would you like to
come inside and check on the class," and he'll go in and he'll go sit down.

Every student needed to be prepared to engage in a professional greeting with a visitor,
otherwise, they would risk getting a demerit. While one would imagine that this expectation
would be useful in preparing students to meet new people in future academic and professional
settings as Emma appreciated, she also noted that this was not a practice that all students wanted
to engage in:
Because if an adult tells me to do something, I'm not going to question it. I was raised
that way. I was always raised to give respect and listen to what they tell me. But if you
ask some other classmates who aren't used to that, they were like, "Why would y'all do
this? Why? Why this? Why that?”

Emma states that she was taught by her family to listen to authority figures. This meant that she
embraced the greeting system and did not question respecting and listening to adults, even when
they were strangers. She also mentions that some of her classmates were not as quick to fall in
line. In addition to getting demerits for not following the rules by arriving at school late or
wearing headphones in the hallways, students also lost points for not abiding by the school
uniform rules.
School Uniforms

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The guidelines for the uniform expectations were quite particular. As described by
Dwayne, a first-year at UCI, “the rules were you have to wear a [CPHS] shirt, a black
pants/skirt- whatever you want to wear, and then dark business shoes and a black belt, and you
always had to carry your ID with you at all times.” Though they mentioned moments of
annoyance with the uniform policy, alumni participants generally reflected positively upon these
expectations for two reasons. First, they appreciated the ways it eased their high school
experience. More specifically, they believed it made the process of getting ready for school in
the morning easier and helped reduce the comparisons students might make based on name
brands. As Elon, a UCI junior, explained:
I think that it was something that sort of taught me too because at the other school that I
attended, we just wore normal clothes. Everybody was constantly thinking about what
they had to wear that day. I think that with uniforms it keeps you disciplined with, like,
how you keep yourself thinking I guess … Keeping yourself tidy and neat and all that
stuff.

Since he attended a school where uniforms were not required, he reflects upon the comparison of
his classmates who were “constantly thinking about what they had to wear” and his CPHS peers
who he believes learned to be disciplined and neat. Vida, another UCI first-year, shared a similar
sentiment to Elon:
Aside from it decreasing the percentage of bullying, it's a really good way because you
don't spend ... You don't need to be very fashionable. Or you don't need to have the good
clothing to make yourself the best or how you will take it. But I feel like it's the best way
to make a schoolwork really good because everybody dresses the same. Everybody looks
the same. There's nobody that's better than anybody. So I feel like that's ... That's what I
liked about charter schools, that they all just require a uniform.

From Vida’s perspective, uniforms curbed concerns related to bullying as well as concerns about
fashion and finances. Emma emphasizes Vida’s point about her appreciation for the connection
among uniforms, charter schools, and affordability:
I'm grateful for charter schools because we have a uniform, especially that time where it's

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financially hard, where you can just buy three shirts and three pants and you can last.
Like, the pants I'm wearing now I've had for three years. And you just repair them. That's
the truth around this community having clothes to buy every year- every once in a while
because you have to keep replacing, replacing. I know a lot of kids hate uniforms, but I'm
grateful for them especially coming from a financially hard area.

In addition to not being able to make financial and social comparisons, Max, a UCI sophomore,
shared that the uniform also kept students from publicizing what he believed to be negative
images or associations. In his own words, “Nobody is different. Nobody’s wearing certain
clothes that represent a certain gang. Nobody’s representing weed or anything. There’s none of
those, like, bad graphics, you know?”
Secondly, they shared that the uniform represented professionalism and prepared them
for the future. Alex, who acknowledged how helpful the demerit system was, felt similarly about
uniforms: “It was different at first since I wasn't really used to the uniform. But yeah, I mean it
kind of gives you a sense of professionalism. So then, it was kind of helpful in a way.” Some
even remarked that they liked that their uniforms helped sparked a connection with adults on
public transportation. As Dolan, a UCR first-year student, reflects,
And I feel like it has to do a lot with the school I went to in the sense that it also gave me
this... I feel like it was this power it sometimes gave me, especially when I would actually
wear my whole uniform and I would go out and just take the bus. And I mean,
downtown, I feel like I had to come and talk to a lot of professional people. So I’d often
be like, "You know what? I'm professional right now. So let's do it together." And I feel
like that really helped me, knowing that I was representing [CPHS]. And it really made
me want to try to be professional and stuff like that because I mean, I've been... I don't
want to be sour, but I've been kind of ghetto.

Dolan’s comments are important for how we understand the significance of wearing the uniform
to her. She explains that she felt like it gave her power so that when she was in public spaces,
like while riding the bus, people recognized her as a CPHS student. Instead of feeling
embarrassed, she talked herself into feeling confident enough to engage with others to represent
her school. To her, she sees her prior identity as “ghetto” in opposition to what it means to be

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professional. This assumed dichotomy of “ghetto” versus “professional” is a challenge brought
forth through participants’ language use. This tension is discussed further in the exploration of
neoliberal meritocracy, the study’s last finding, whereby students are socialized to believe in
limited, racialized, and individualized definitions of success.
Though many students found these disciplinary systems to ultimately be helpful as they
prepared for college, careers, and life, some students did note how the policies were far too rigid.
They recognized that their lives, as well as those of their peers, were very complicated yet the
“no excuses” policies left very little understanding of their financial and geographical barriers, as
well as their desire to be agentic young adults who were capable of making their own decisions.
Another student who used the term “ghetto” to refer to the South Central neighborhood where he
grew up, Hamilton, graduated with the Class of 2016- the first group of CPHS alumni. He
attended UCR for two years after completing high school but then struggled both academically
and with his mental health. When reflecting upon the discipline policies, he shared:
It was kind of a bittersweet thing where it did help for the students that were constantly
getting in trouble, like the ones who would, like, cause problems that weren’t related to
dress code and tardiness. Like, I feel like the demerit system should be kept in place, but
not enforced to every little detail possible. Like, (sighs) yeah, I think they had – just
should have more understanding of the complications of others’ lives and just yeah, like,
I accept the policy of demerits and stuff, but I don’t know. I would be more
understanding of people’s situations. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Hamilton seemed to appreciate how the demerit system helped through its impact on the students
who were “constantly getting in trouble” by causing more serious problems. Yet, he seems to
allude to issues related to tardiness and uniform as less serious concerns. Ultimately, he
advocated for the rules to be more flexible in some ways by acknowledging the complexities of
students’ lives.

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Other students agreed and shared how struggles related to the distance between home and
school created barriers that resulted in unwarranted demerits. Courtney offers how travel was
especially difficult in the LA context:
The only thing that I thought was a bit unnecessary was if you were, like, one minute late
that was one demerit, two minutes late, that’s two, three minutes is four. Like, I don’t
think I should be given a detention for being five minutes late to school because. you
know, traffic in downtown LA is real.

At the time when Courtney was a student, CPHS was located in a very busy downtown area of
Los Angeles and the school was in a building with many other corporate offices where both
students and professionals filled crowded streets and hallways. Though most students lived in
nearby neighborhoods, Vanessa’s family moved to North Hollywood in search of a safer
environment. This made her commute to CPHS very long. Though her classmate’s mom drove
her to school for the first few years, Courtney wanted to be more independent, so by the end of
her sophomore year, she was waking up extremely early in the morning to take public
transportation to school. She explained the complexities of commuting to school with the rigid
tardiness rules:
I felt like when I was doing the commuting thing it was hard cause the train would break
down or the bus would come late. And when you were more than, um, a minute late, it's
already two, or if you were more than 30 minutes late, it was four demerits. Like, that
was an instant detention, so there were times where I was like, “I'm not going to be more
than 30 minutes late. Like, I'm not gunna get a detention.” So I was like, “I can do the
work from home either way, why not stay home and miss out?”

Though she woke up early, public transportation ran late or broke down entirely, making
detention inevitable for Vanessa and students like her facing similar commuting challenges.
Vanessa mentions how there were times when she would rather miss a day at school than arrive
late and have to serve a detention. She goes on to explain how the rules regarding tardiness got
even more rigid over time:

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At first, I remember like freshman and sophomore year, it wasn't, it was, like, if you have
a note, saying, “Oh hey, the bus broke down” or something that your parents could, you
know, confirm that it was okay. But after the second year, it was just, no, that's not
allowed anymore. Like, if your bus breaks down or the train, it's like, okay come earlier.
But I'm like, but I already come early! … Cause in my specific street, the bus isn't, it
comes once every 50 minutes. So if you miss it, you miss it.

As the years progressed, calling the school ahead of time or having a parent confirm the reason
for your tardiness was no longer sufficient. The real world is complicated. Colleges and places of
work expect that individuals will have moments when they are late or unable to show up and are
typically okay with these instances as long as they are infrequent and they have been provided
with an explanation ahead of time. Yet, the “no excuses” nature of the CPHS environment does
not allow tardiness, even if it is by a few minutes and it means a student would miss an entire
day of school.
In a similar way, Hamilton worried about the rigidity of the uniform system and how one
mistake could force students to miss precious class time.
But yeah, and then dress code. I understand the whole uniform thing, but it didn’t make
sense to me where, for example, I once forgot my belt. Like, it happens. I’m in a rush.
I’m human. (laughs) And I forgot my belt, and the weird thing was, like, if I had no belt, I
got four demerits, which was an instant detention. And even though I was at school, I
wasn’t allowed to go into class to do my work normally just because I didn’t have a belt.
Like, that did not make sense. My belt was not going to stop me from doing any less
work, you know? (laughs) Yeah, so there were some procedures that I did not appreciate,
which was – one of them was that, like, what’s the point of removing you? What good
does that teach me? Like, I simply forgot my belt. It doesn’t help me to keep me in a
different room away from my teachers which are willing to help me and, you know, do
my work (laughs) like I’m supposed to.

One can sense the frustration and genuine confusion that Hamilton shares through his story. He
came to school and forgot to wear his belt, which is a required part of the school uniform.
Though he knows he made a mistake, he cannot understand why it would warrant missing
valuable class time. Dwayne, a Class of 2019 graduate, also shares concerns about the strict

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uniform policy by questioning the assumption that wearing the uniform indicates
professionalism:
Honestly, if you're a really creative person, I think that was the thing that will hold you
back to being confined to just look like one another, I don't know. I don't think that was...
They'd always discuss professionalism, but now you're looking at a road where the very
definition of professionalism, and what it is nowadays, it's being redefined to which it's
not you coming in a suit to work. It's changing with the times, so in that way, I think
there should be some revision to that. Letting people express at least some level of
intuition, individuality and the way they like dressing in clothes … Again, being
minorities, they have very little control over their lives. So when you're able to give them
just a little bit more, I think that also just helps them develop at least a sense of
independence as an individual.

Not only does Dwayne worry that the uniforms are stripping students’ of their creativity and
individuality, but he is also concerned that they are just another way that minoritized students are
constrained.
In summary, the no-excuses discipline system, which consists of merits and demerits as
well as required school uniforms, is a powerful socializing school structure. While the no-
excuses approach may be aimed at preparing students for the realities of current societal
expectations, the school may be enforcing rules in ways that fail to take account of the systemic
challenges that minoritized students face at the expense of their academics.
Consequences: Neoliberal Meritocracy
Rather than answer questions related to “why,” “where,” “when,” and “how come” the
central phenomenon occurs, consequences detail “what happens” related to the central
phenomenon based upon the actions and interactions of the participants in a given context (Do &
Schallert, 2004; Charmaz, 2006). In this study, most of the students’ perspectives align with a
concept I have labeled “neoliberal meritocracy.” I assert that the consequence of “neoliberal
meritocracy” represents how Latinx, urban charter school graduates approach the college
transition process. Scholars in the fields of sociology, political science, and economics have

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described neoliberal meritocracy and its related terms as emphasizing qualities such as
individualism, personal achievement, and competition while de-emphasizing others like
collectivism and solidarity (Viana & da Silva, 2018). Given this research context, I provide a
closer connection and analysis between students’ voices and relevant literature to explore how
neoliberal meritocracy functions as a consequence of the college transition process for Latinx
urban charter school graduates.
Though education scholars have analyzed concepts of neoliberalism (e.g. Lipman, 2011)
and meritocracy (e.g. Warikoo, 2016) extensively, I take an interdisciplinary perspective that
applies the combined terminology and processes to higher education in particular. Through an
analysis of the data based upon students’ voices, I define neoliberal meritocracy in the context of
this study as a perspective that students carry concerning education and opportunity. Neoliberal
meritocracy assumes that inequality has and will continue to occur. At the same time, this
outlook positions educational systems as fostering inequality while also serving as one of the few
mechanisms that can provide historically marginalized people with opportunity through
individualistic professional and financial success. While previous conceptions of meritocracy
presumed that hard work results in personal rewards, participants were clear that this notion is
false, especially after seeing family members work extremely hard with few resulting benefits.
Alternatively, the youth in this study instead view meritocracy from a neoliberal perspective,
whereby they must work harder than their more privileged counterparts to receive the same
benefits, even if this means accepting that their environments are unjust. Students view this
potential for future success as a direct benefit to their families and an indirect benefit to their
communities where they can serve as an example of what is possible. Yet, individualism, which

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drives this mindset, continues to be antithetical to collectivism and incapable of addressing the
structural nature of inequality.
Through listening to students as they made sense of their own experiences as well as
those of their family and friends, I found that neoliberal meritocracy in the context of this
grounded theory study consists of particular perspectives related to three main topics: (1)
knowledge of self, (2) connection to one’s cultural community, and (3) the ways participants
grappled with notions related to meritocracy and inequality. The following findings define each
component of neoliberal meritocracy and then connect those descriptions to students’
experiences and perspectives.
Knowledge of Self
One key element of understanding how an individual might align with the features of
neoliberal meritocracy is by considering how they think about themselves and the identities that
make up who they are. While multiple facets of one’s identity may inform how they think about
themselves, participants discussed racial/ethnic, gender, U.S. citizenship, and class markers of
their experiences most often. When asked about how they identify, students described
themselves in various ways, from “straight Latino” to “Female, pronouns are she, her, hers,
Mexican American.” Some students even laughed when asked about how they identify, noting
how answering such a question has become a part of how college students introduce themselves
in today’s environment. As Courtney, a senior at UCR, and I discussed:
Courtney: Okay, (laughs) I have this scripted. “Hi, I’m a fourth-year psychology major.
My pronouns are she, her and hers, and I come from a Central American background.”
Liane: Got it. Wow, you really have that all worked out.
Courtney: Every quarter. (laughs) Every class. It’s really annoying sometimes.

In our interaction, Courtney had a “scripted” response when asked how she identifies. In an age
of preferred gender pronouns (PGPs), which offer how one wants to be referred to based on their

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gender identity, as well as discussions about origins based on DNA tests, Courtney seems jaded
by what some refer to as “identity politics.”
Even though participants did not use academic terminology such as “intersectionality,”
which speaks to the complex dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression that occur at the
intersections of multiple identities (Cho, Crenshaw, McCall, 2013; Crenshaw, 1991), they did
mention these challenges in their own ways. One of the more common examples includes how
women-identified students grappled with the intersection of their race/ethnicity and gender
identities. Alexandria, who is a first-year at UCLA, details the complexity of being a Latina
when asked what her identities mean to her:
It means that I'm a Latina woman in America in a very dominant male environment.
Being Latina is kind of being like a double minority. It's like, woman and Latina. I was
born in America but because I'm Latina, a lot of people have stereotypes about me, and
that sucks. But it's like, I'm here to do what I have to do and what I look like, where I'm
from, where my family's from, shouldn't matter. Yeah, I'm just here to do my job and
that's it.

Alexandria seems to have a strong understanding of how her racial/ethnic and gendered identities
matter for how the world perceives her, yet, she also determines that the best way to overcome
such challenges is to “do my job.” Rather than question how these stereotypes came to be and
how they might impact her educational and professional opportunities from a structural
perspective, neoliberal meritocracy encourages her to do her best to disprove stereotypes through
striving towards success.
Andy, a sophomore at UCLA, described how “machismo,” a term often used to describe
presumed masculine behaviors of men of Latin American descent in general, as well as Mexican
men in particular (Arciniega et al., 2008), functioned in her own family:
The machismo within my family was crazy. (laughs) … So as a young girl I was mostly
just listening, but once I grew – Once I grew and became older, I started to speak my
mind more. For my college application for here, at UCLA, I actually spoke – or like,

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talked about machismo within my family and how it really has influenced me as a person
and as a Latina.

When I asked Andy when she became aware of potential gender differences, she told me about
her parents and how her mother would cook and clean while her dad watched TV. As a younger
child, she would join him in the TV watching, but as she got older, she noticed how he would
encourage her to join her mom by helping with the chores. These experiences caused her to ask
many questions and even inspired her to take gender studies courses in college.
As mentioned previously, a neoliberal and meritocratic approach to understanding one’s
self is often very individualistic. As Viana and daSilva (2018) describe it, “neoliberal
meritocracy has created a cutthroat environment in which every person is their own ambassador,
the sole spokesman for their product and broker of their own labor, in an endless sea of
competition” (p. 2113). Individualism, in part, came through in students’ responses to questions
about who they are and who they believed other students to be. Within the CPHS context,
students mentioned that to get the most out of the academic and social experience, it was up to
students to make the most of it. Dwayne, a UCI first-year, reflected upon how well the self-paced
curriculum worked for him. He then suggested that others could have taken better advantage of
College Prep’s academic approach: “It's up to students to find those little pockets of holes where
you do have time you could fill it in productively.” Fellow UCI first-year, Vida, shared similar
sentiments,
I feel like it all depends on the person … If you don't know how to manage your time, if
you don't pace yourself out, or if you don't take good notes, if you're just fooling around,
it's going to be a lot harder. But if you actually take every class, every hour and 15
minutes there is, then it won't be that hard.

The nature of the academic curriculum at CPHS is inherently individualistic in that students
work at their own pace. Though students can get support from their peers and their teachers, the

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self-pacing approach reinforces the idea that one’s education is an individual endeavor, perhaps
further emphasizing individualism as a part of students’ academic identities.
Graduates from CPHS’s earlier classes noted how competition seemed to grow over time
following the school’s founding. As Natalie, a graduate of the first Class of 2016, recalled about
the years following the change in leadership:
… everyone focuses on GPA at [CPHS], so everybody is just like – all the students have
a mindset like you have to get into a good university, so it’s just everybody’s like, oh, I’m
not trying to be at the end of the line, so I’m just going to be – like, trying to improve, do
homework, try to get AP classes and then you just – it kind of helps you, but at the same
time it just has a competitive mentality that it doesn’t really work in college, because in
college you’re just trying to work more with other people to help each other, but at
[CPHS] they built it like, “oh no, you have to get into the university and you have to be at
the best rank” and all of that.

While Natalie acknowledges that the leaders and teachers of her first year did not foster a
consistently strong learning environment like those that followed, she felt as if the competitive
spirit of her high school experience did not match the collaboration expected of college students.
Natalie’s fellow Class of 2016 graduate, Hamilton, agreed that students were upset about the
changes they experienced between their first and second year at CPHS, especially related to the
discipline policies mentioned previously. At the same time, like Natalie, he agreed that the
emphasis on college helped. Though their class was not initially fond of the new college
counselor, they ultimately were inspired to want to attend college and felt supported through the
college process as Hamilton shares:
But as the college application went through, I started learning more about campuses,
what they offered and the freedoms people would get and the experiences of classes and
just meeting new people, so that kind of got me excited about going to college … [the
new college counselor] ultimately helped us a lot to figure out, like, where we want to go
and how we got there and made sure we got there the right way by doing financial aid
and all that.

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So, while College Prep’s earliest classes may have not liked the major shifts in culture and policy
when the leadership and teachers changed following their first year, they seemed to ultimately
appreciate preparation and support towards the goals of applying to and attending college.
Ultimately, participants largely shared fairly individualistic perspectives of their multiple
identities, whereby they may have developed the language to describe their race/ethnic,
gendered, and class identities but rarely connected these experiences to systemic challenges
informed by societal cultures, organizations, and policies. This pattern continued in terms of
reflecting upon their academic experiences at CPHS. The online modules are completed based on
students’ self-pacing. In connection, participants shared their belief that their peers could have
used their time in more efficient ways to move faster through the curriculum. Finally, alumni
from the earliest classes shared how they noticed a greater emphasis on both discipline and
college preparation during the school’s change in leadership following their first year towards a
more competitive school culture. Such experiences have implications for how students think
about themselves as people and students. Given a shared Latinx ethnoracial identity, neoliberal
meritocracy also matters for how students consider their own cultural heritage in particular,
especially as they transition to college.
Connection to Cultural Communities
Intricately linked to how students made sense of themselves and their multiple identities,
participants also had distinct experiences that informed their personal connections to their
cultures. Their familial, high school, and college environments had important influences on how
participants connected, or not, to their broader cultural heritage, traditions, beliefs, and
communities.

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Family. The Latinx culture, which describes how students identified even when they
used similar but different terminology (i.e., Latino/a, Hispanic, Spanish) includes a wide variety
of nations, traditions, and customs. Yet, many of these communities, like other racially
minoritized groups, exemplify communal traits, especially through connections between family
and education (Carey, 2016; Kiyama, 2011; Saunders & Serna, 2004). This was no different for
CPHS alumni who discussed the importance of their cultures and familial traditions. One of
those important cultural traits includes how language is passed along from parents to their
children. Frida, a UCLA first-year, discussed the influence of linguistic experiences on her life:
I think just because they're Spanish speaking first, well, they speak English, but Spanish
first, so that's always been... Bilingual has always been playing a role in my life and then
just the fact that they're Mexican, they brought us up as Mexican parents would, Catholic
and all that.

For Frida, there is a connection among being bilingual, Mexican, and Catholic that all contribute
to who she is today through her parents’ influence. Yayo, a first-year at UCR, shared the story of
his Mexican parents, extended family, and friends’ struggles with assimilation:
I do remember my parents trying to assimilate to the culture here, but at the end of the
day, they're like, “what the heck, I'll be myself.” So they stayed who they are and I feel
like that's important just because I have other family members who don't want anything
to do with, like... Not necessarily don't want anything to do, but they disregard a lot of
important key pieces to their roots. They're like, "I don't eat that food." Okay. So, stuff
like that. I'm not like that. I have friends who are embarrassed to say they're Mexican.
And, like, I understand that. Their reasons are very valid, just because they've been
discriminated and whatnot. But thankfully, I haven't been discriminated or at least I
haven't noticed I have been discriminated, so it doesn't really come to mind.

Here, Yayo notes that grappling with concerns about assimilating or not to American culture is a
process. He also mentions that perhaps people who have been discriminated against because of
their Mexican identity are less likely to want to identify with their culture. Despite the decisions
that others have made, Yayo aligns with his parents in feeling pride in being himself- a person of
Mexican descent.

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Amber, a junior at UCI, offered how difficult it was to maintain her family’s pride in
their culture when she did not see many people who shared in this identity when she transitioned
to college.
It was a very big part of our identity, especially my dad. He always took pride of being
Mexican and that was always, you know, present in our home. So that was a factor that
kind of, I would say, I struggled with in college, because in Irvine there’s a lot of, what’s
it called? There’s diversity, but you don’t really see a lot of Latinx students within Irvine.
So you know, being Mexican and being proud of being Mexican-American or Chicana, it
was just very tough for me to see the ethnic change, like the culture shock, so yeah, that
was something I struggled with in college.

For Amber, she went from a household and a local community where her Mexican-American
and Chicana cultures were embraced and reflected in those around her. When she transitioned to
college, it became difficult to manage the “ethnic change” and “culture shock” she experienced
without a large Latinx community.
One participant in particular shared a unique position that differed from the majority of
participants. James, a UCI sophomore, thought that the tradition of close families might be a
detriment to Latinx students. Though he felt that his family was quite open and supportive of
whatever choice he made, he found that this was not typically the case for his Latinx peers.
When asked at the close of our interview if there was anything he wanted to mention that we had
not discussed already, James shared the following insight:
I think that’s interesting because it’s good for people to have, you know, values from
their family to – like, it’s not good to not have that, you know? But I feel like sometimes
family might be a big barricade for some people, and I talk to a lot of people, like, in the
Hispanic community, and that’s a big thing in the Hispanic community. Like, it seems
like parents want to hold their kids back, you know? … a lot of the Hispanic students I
talk to, a lot of them are like, “oh, like, I didn’t go very far because my parents” – or “I
didn’t take this opportunity because of them,” so I feel that maybe knowing when to kind
of disconnect from family and personal growth and your personal, you know, value, I feel
like that’s a big deal sometimes.

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Not only was this an observed concern that James carried, but the alumni advisor at CPHS also
mentioned some of these concerns in his work with families around the college process. He and
the college counselor were working together to better engage families in the process and inform
them of the importance of college, even if it meant that their children would be farther away
from home and less able to assist with responsibilities at home. Such tensions among cultural
norms, families, and schools provided students with many opportunities to continue to learn
about their ethnoracialized identities throughout their CPHS experience.
High school. In addition to cultural ties through family by learning about one’s
generational histories and traditions, participants also mentioned the importance of cultural
connections in the CPHS environment. With a high school environment composed of 80%
Latinx, 18% Black, and 2% Asian students, participants offered what this demographic makeup
meant to them. Many students shared their appreciation for having so many classmates they
shared racial/ethnic identities with. Dolan, a first-year at UCR, started 9th grade at another high
school- one that was actually a part of the same CMO as CPHS. Though she was surrounded by
majority Latinx students who shared her Mexican-American identity, she described them as
abiding by “White culture” since they did not appear to be from low-income households and
often spoke English. When she got into CPHS for her sophomore year, she was excited to meet
friends and find a social environment that embraced the language and music of Mexican culture:
And my closest friends are Mexican, come from Mexican parents, and they're very, very
proud. And I remember back then I would never listen to Spanish music. And it's not for
any reason, but I just wouldn't. But then when I came to [CPHS], I started listening to
Spanish music a lot. And I started practicing a lot of Mexican culture. And yeah, I guess
[CPHS] really helped me with being more prideful, or at least showing it.

Dolan felt pride in her Mexican identity before CPHS, but did not always feel like she could
express it in the ways she wanted to at her prior high school.

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Students also appreciated the structured elements, most commonly the clubs and
activities, that allowed them to build upon these shared ethnoracialized identities further. Student
organizations, such as the Spanish Honor Society, provided spaces of pride, connection, and
belonging. As Alexandria describes the organization: “Spanish Honor Society is where we really
dive into what it means to be Latino, what it means to be Hispanic, what it means to be Mexican,
what it means to be Guatemalan, all the types of that.” Fellow Class of 2019 graduate, Dolan,
actually attributed her cultural pride, mentioned previously, to being a part of the society
throughout most of her time at CPHS:
Then when I went onto [CPHS], it was a whole different story because most of the people
there were more proud. I can see my Spanish Honor Society going like, "I'm here" and
stuff like that. It was, I think, my sophomore, junior and senior year. It helped me
actually appreciate my culture and know more about my culture and actually be with my
culture and stuff like that.

As Dolan reflected upon during her follow up interview following her first quarter of college at
UCR, prior to CPHS, she noticed herself trying to assimilate to White, American culture as she
tried to fit in at her first high school. Upon attending CPHS and joining cultural organizations,
she developed confidence in her own Mexican-American identity.
In addition to student organizations, participants also appreciated how the college
readiness class encouraged them to consider the importance of identity, and racial/ethnic identity
in particular, as they transitioned to college. Once the majority of the application and financial
aid processes were complete, the main course instructor switched from the college counselor to
the alumni advisor who focused on preparing students for the college transition. For the Class of
2019, the alumni advisor actually brought in a local non-profit organization to conduct a
presentation during class about identity. Alex, a UCR freshman, described this activity in the
following way:

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I think they just talked about how we had to remember who we were and not try to
change for someone else, because then... If you just try to assimilate just to fit in with
some other people, then you might forget your identity. So, then you won't really know
who you are. So then, it's important for you to remember your roots, remember where
you come from, and then pretty much who you are.

Alex appreciated this lesson and believed it helped remind him of who he is before needing to
transition to a “big university.” Dwayne, a UCI freshman, discussed how such lessons in the
college readiness course influenced how he defined himself:
Bottom line, I just wanted to be Jose, I didn't want to be really tied down to anything.
Still kind of am that way, but I do understand the need to know who you are so you don't
lose yourself entering college. I didn't know it was the biggest thing I learned, from [the
alumni advisor] especially, is you need to know who you are because if you don't, in
college you have so many people tell you different things and you, yourself, are really
going to find who you are … It was more, like, I really had to reflect on me and who do I
think I am, even if it was, like, basic labels like Hispanic or something like that because it
was always just a foundation. So in its entirety, I don't feel like these words are just
words. I mean, they do say something, but they just ... I don't know. It's so complicated to
define a person by just these simple words in itself, but I tried. I tried to feel a bunch of
these words together and tried to form who I was.

Here, Dwayne is grappling with wanting to be viewed as an individual, pushing back against
identity politics and assumed labels, while also trying to make sense of how being “Hispanic”
matters to him.
The college readiness class thoroughly covered the typically complex application
processes in ways that students overwhelmingly appreciated. They were also starting to include
opportunities for learning about the social aspects of college that caused older alumni to
experience culture shock in their university environments. In addition to the identity workshop,
the alumni advisor also brought in alumni to share their experiences and provided other useful
bits of information to current students. For example, he shared a “PWI playlist” with students.
UCLA freshman, Frida, offered the following reflection about the purpose and limitations of
such information:

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In terms of academics and all that, I feel really prepared. But then the impostor syndrome
and all that, I don't know how I feel about it … You can't really prepare a student for
impostor syndrome. I know our teachers would warn us about it and then he would have,
like, a PWI playlist where it was, like, White people music. Yeah, it was the running
joke, but at the end of the day, there's really nothing he can do for us. It's all up to us.

Despite their best efforts, students still felt ill-prepared for managing issues such as “imposter
syndrome.” “Imposter syndrome,” also referred to as “imposter phenomenon,” describes
individuals who feel unworthy of their accomplishments and successes when they do not believe
it has resulted from their own efforts, resulting in feelings of stress and anxiety (Clance & Imes,
1978; Parkman, 2016). This experience can be particularly prominent for historically
marginalized groups, such as first-generation college students as well as high-achieving racially
and ethnically minoritized students (Pulliam & Gonzalez, 2018). Ultimately, students like
Dwayne and Frida continued to have internal debates about who they are and how their identities
might influence their transition to college.
College. In addition to contemplating the influence of family and CPHS on their cultural
identities, participants also offered the importance of joining cultural communities on campus as
they transitioned to college. While this process happened through a variety of interactions with
the college environment, students mentioned that race/ethnicity-specific campus events, student
clubs, and courses were very influential in their cultural identity development.
Campus programs. Even prior to enrolling, race/ethnicity specific campus programs
helped prospective students as they began preparing for the transition to college. At UCLA, they
invited admitted students to Latinx weekend where they could meet current students and develop
familiarity with campus. Multiple participants who ultimately ended up enrolling at the
institution mentioned the importance of this event. Alexandria described the program as
impacting her understanding of her racial/ethnic identity:

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When I went to that Latinx weekend it was like, we are Latinos and you should embrace
that because that is a big part of my identity, and that shapes me into who I am, and that
sets me apart from other people. That should be embraced and not shamed upon.

Admitted students weekend events are typical at colleges across the nation, but providing such
programming that is race/ethnicity specific is less common. Based upon the insights that
Alexandria shared, it appears as if Latinx weekend did much more than get this first-year, first-
generation college student acclimated to campus- it gave her confidence in her cultural identity
too.
Student clubs. Prior to starting college as a first-year at UCR, Alex had an interest in
joining cultural organizations. Here, we discussed potential activities of interest to him and he
explained why this was the case:
Alex: I know they have the Chicano organization, so I looked through that as well. Then
they have other Hispanic clubs, focused… based on engineering, or math, and all that
stuff as well. It's just a lot of cultural… but then there's also others that you could join just
to learn more about that culture or that language, pretty much.
Liane: Why do you think potentially joining some cultural organizations feels like
something that's interesting to you?
Alex: I just feel like it will be important so then I can… So, you could find people that
you could relate to, and then they're going through the same thing as you. So then, you
could have that support from them.

Once students enrolled in college, they mentioned that race/ethnicity specific student
organizations were useful spaces of belonging and connection. A given university’s racial,
ethnic, and class demographics contribute to the extent to which students felt like they were a
part of the social environment. Compared to UCR with a Latinx population of 42%, UCI only
enrolls 26% of Latinx students. Upon starting his college career at UCI, Pablo found Latino
Greek life to be helpful for managing feelings of culture shock.
I enjoyed the fraternity, being a Latino based fraternity. I got to know more other Latinos,
men. I mean, I’ve made friends with other cultures as well, and it wasn’t something I had
a problem with, but it was mainly a culture shock because those were the only people

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who were from different parts of California and just, it wasn’t that much of a number of
Latinos, so it was kind of like culture shock still no matter what.

For Pablo, not having a critical mass of peers who identified as Latinx contributed to
experiencing a culture shock. Though the culture shock persisted, being a part of a fraternity
provided a connection to individuals who might share in those feelings.
Courses. Elon, a junior at UCI, noted the influence of particular college courses on him:
“I think [my identity has] changed a lot, especially coming to UCI and the classes that I've taken.
A couple of them are about race and culture and all those things have sort of changed my
mentality on identity.” Elon went on to explain,
So when I first came to this country, it was a, I've already talked about the difficulties that
I have had to go through but one of the things that was kind of difficult for me was
talking in my dialect and sort of being picked on about it, being bullied about it. So I kind
of swore off when I was younger to not say that I was from Guatemala so whenever
somebody would ask me where I'm from I would, I would just always say that I'm from
LA. But now with being educated about these other things, I feel more pride in my
culture and who I am.

Elon and I continued to discuss how this pride that he developed through certain college classes
compared to the pride that a place like CPHS might have encouraged:
I would say after taking those college classes, I wouldn't say it was something that was
fully emphasized, but it was, I mean [CPHS] sort of emphasized the culture of pride in
the students but also pride in creating success. So that was pretty awesome. But overall,
like, in my own identity, I sort of came to realize it here at UCI.

Elon makes a very important distinction through his personal reflection. While he enjoyed that
CPHS facilitated a culture of pride in students, he also felt like they emphasized pride in one’s
success. This approach seems helpful as students manage challenges related to imposter
syndrome as mentioned previously. Yet, students could not understand how historical and
systemic factors have resulted in a higher prevalence of imposter syndrome among racially

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minoritized students in particular. Instead, Elon’s college courses related to race and culture
seemed to have a more meaningful influence on his identity.
For some students, their cultural identities became even more important than they were
prior to college. This was a trend for UCLA students, perhaps in part due to the fact that they
only enroll 22% of Latinx students in addition to a class divide given that the median family
income is $104,900, which is among the highest in California (Chetty et al., 2017). As UCLA
sophomore, Andy, and I discussed:
Andy: It’s crazy because in high school, middle school, elementary – elementary
especially, like I never really thought about ethnicity and my race much, but once I got
here, in college, I noticed that there’s not much Latinas and not many people from low-
income families coming here to UCLA. Like, now I really do think it’s an important part
of my life. If anything, I really do embrace my Latina side now more than before.
Liane: What are some of the ways you’ve been able to do that as a college student?
Andy: I guess join, like, some – what’s it called? Join groups, like extracurriculars that
help out Latina students, Latino students or, like, Latinx students. Also I guess it just – I
don’t know, I guess listening to Spanish songs, going to (laughs) Latino parties and all
that, yeah.

Based upon her experiences, Andy finds that she is even more connected to her identity as a
Latina as a result of the minimal representation of people who share her ethnoracialized and
classed experiences on UCLA’s campus. Clubs, music, and parties that she can partake in with
people from her cultural community have become an important part of her life. Across all of
these familial, high school, and college experiences, participants seemed to share a desire to
learn about and connect to their Latinx culture. This feeling seemed to grow for many as they
transitioned to college campuses where the Latinx community was much smaller, especially in
comparison to CPHS. Ultimately, each stage informed how they viewed themselves, their
communities, as well as their college and career aspirations.
Grappling with Merit and Inequality

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In addition to considering how a neoliberal, meritocratic belief system informs how
participants reflect upon themselves and their cultural community, this consequence also
influences how students grapple with notions of merit and inequality. I begin by providing their
perspectives on how their future pursuits are meant to support them and their families, but are
limited in their extension to broader communities. I then summarize how participants’ responses
to hypothetical scenarios based upon campus racial bias incidents indicate students’ likelihood to
navigate inequality rather than change unjust systems. Finally, I provide four vignettes based
upon the experiences of CPHS graduates who enrolled at one of the three UCs, but for a variety
of reasons, withdrew from the institution to provide insight into how neoliberal meritocracy can
counter the circumstances needed to foster student success.
Self and family. Participants spoke about how they wanted to pursue college and their
future professions of interest as a means of helping members of their family, but rarely extended
the benefits of their success to their broader communities and social groups (i.e. racial/ethnic
groups, gender, class, etc.). In terms of helping their families and setting an example for future
generations, Alex who is a UCR freshman, shared his reason for wanting to attend college as a
hopeful future biomedical engineer, “Pretty much just to help out my parents later in the future.
Then to have a better chances to have a better job than me just not going to college.” Vida, a UCI
freshman, shared similar commitments to her family with her college aspirations:
Overall, I just think about my siblings and my mom. I always think, oh my parents came
here for a reason … I actually want them to feel proud of me. And overall, just my
siblings, I feel like it's really important to have an education in order to succeed. Not all
the time, but I feel like it's a good way to just maintain yourself here and have a good life,
a stable life.

Both Alex and Vida want the financial stability that they believe comes from earning a college
degree. Alex wants to be able to help his family financially, and Vida wants to make her parents

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feel as if their sacrifices were worth it while serving as a positive influence on her younger
siblings.
Participants often listed parents and siblings as a major source of inspiration for pursuing
a college degree. Though less common, others offered their hope that such an accomplishment
would have broader implications for their community and members of their ethnoracial groups.
According to Emma, a first-year at UCR, “Everyone has the same idea. We want to help our
family. We want to help our community. We want to show that we're better than what the TV
says.” Max, a sophomore at UCI, shared a similar perspective:
I think it was really important for me because I’m representing my family. I’m
representing my culture or my – my race, pretty much, because there’s a lot of us that are
out there, but I want to encourage other people to also – to step up, that we can all make it
at the same level.

Both Emma and Max understand that whether or not they chose to, they are representatives of
their racial and ethnic communities. Emma points out that the media does not fairly portray the
groups she identifies with which inspires her to want to change that narrative through her own
journey. Max appears to understand the problems of unequal opportunity as something that
individuals can address, suggesting that people from his racial group may only need
encouragement to “step up” and reach success. Alexandria, a UCLA freshman, has a similar
orientation to her dreams of attending college:
Nobody in my family's ever been to college. Everybody... Not a lot of people in my
family even graduated high school, so I knew I like to be different. I like to do my own
thing, so I really wanted to go to college because that's where I feel like I can focus on
my education. And I am a minority, and I get that, but because I am a minority I have to
work extra hard. And I hate that, but that's the brutal reality that I have to do, so I have to
go to college to do that.

Alexandria believes that college may be a way to differentiate herself from others as well as
providing an environment where she can “focus on [her] education.” She also acknowledges that

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as a “minority” she will need to work extra hard to reach her goals. Rather than question why
this might be the case, she accepts this fate and elects to navigate higher education by
understanding that an unfair system is the current reality- like so many come to accept as the
norm. Compared to prior conceptions, Alexandria’s perspective shows that students today
understand that inequality exists -especially as it relates to racially minoritized communities- and
they know this is unfair. So even though they know that traditional notions of meritocracy are
false based upon personal experiences as well as those of their families, peers, and communities,
they also do not know another way to find success beyond continuing the same tradition of
working harder than their Whiter, more privileged peers in the U.S. context.
Hypothetical scenarios. Though students provided various points of insight into their
perspectives on merit and inequality throughout our discussions, there was a particular segment
of the interview protocol that proved to be particularly useful for understanding their opinions.
For each of the 10 students from the Class of 2019 that I interviewed prior to their college
enrollment, I provided them with two hypothetical scenarios and asked them two questions
pertaining to each situation: (1) how would you feel? and (2) what would you do?
The first scenario was the same across participants. I told participants to imagine
themselves walking into a large lecture hall for class on the first day of college. I then asked how
they would feel and what they would do if they realized that they were the only person of their
race/ethnicity and gender. The purpose of this scenario-based question was to gain insight into
how students’ might respond to a situation that minoritized students have experienced and
scholars have documented across higher education literature. I also wanted to get a sense of their
preparation for such instances and how they might explain ethnoracialized and gendered
inequalities in college environments. Participants spoke about the myriad of ways they would

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ultimately try to ignore feeling uncomfortable. As stated by Mexican-American UCR student,
Emma,
I would just try to look over it and put myself there because I shouldn't give a damn about
those other people because we're all here; we're paying. This is my education. I don't care
about them, unless we have to work together. Then I'll care. But if they're doing anything
to me, let them do it, because at the end of the day, I'm here for me and only me.

Less confident in her response, Mexican-American UCI student, Vida, shared her concerns but
ultimately had the same conclusion:
I feel like I would feel pressured because people would have eyes on me. Not pressure,
but I would feel kind of uncomfortable … Or weirded out because I feel like if I do
something wrong, then they would always, just, I don't know, just start aiming at me.
Like start saying stuff or ... Yeah. But I wouldn't pay much attention to it.

Vida speaks about the kind of pressure being the only one representing your identity-based
communities might create for her, yet, she would grapple with the concerns by trying to ignore it.
Yayo, another Mexican-American student attending UCR, spoke about the importance of
confidence in managing his reaction:
I'd feel small but the thing my dad told me- you, like, walk into the room feeling you own
the place... Confidence overpowers everything. So, I'll just carry myself. Just keep going.
It's going to be hard. When I was little I was scared of like, "Don't look at me. Don't look
at me." But now, I just don't care.

While trying to ignore the discomfort of the situation while building upon one’s confidence is a
helpful and common coping strategy, students did not mention questioning why large,
introductory college courses might not include people who shared their identities. And though
students like Yayo spoke about finding strength in words of wisdom from their parents, they
built their resilience upon individual and familial lenses, rather than collectivist traditions of
community strength and cultural tradition.
UC Irvine. For the second scenario, I provided students with a summary of a racial bias
incident that occurred on the college campus where they intended to enroll in the fall. To

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determine the events, I conducted an online search and used news and social media articles as the
main source of information. For students attending UCI, I mentioned an event that occurred in
2012 where an Asian-American fraternity threw a party where one member wore Blackface and
another wore a sombrero and a poncho- seemingly trying to mimic stereotypical depictions of
Mexican culture. I asked soon-to-be UCI first-years how they might respond after walking into a
party where this was happening. Vida responded, “I don't get ... For example, if you're wearing
whatever it is of Mexico, I don't mind. But if you're talking stuff about my culture, I would
actually say something.” Seeing someone who did not seemingly share her race/ethnicity wear
those items did not necessarily anger her. Instead, explicitly offensive comments would have
been where she drew the line, catalyzing her to respond. For Dwayne, an extremely inquisitive
young man, he had many follow up questions. We discussed how he believed he would react:
Dwayne: My reception to that would always be like, if it's funny. I know it's not funny
because again, others like a big impression, but I feel like a remedy to that would be
laughter. I don't know if it was funny. Again, if it was funny then sure, but they were just
like ... It really depends on their intentions. If your intention is to ... I don't know.
Liane: There's no right answer.
Dwayne: I know, I know. But I'm just trying to think about it. I… initially, if I saw that,
I'd probably get really angry. I'd probably try to ... I'd fight. I'd fight, I'd fight.
Liane: How do you go from you're going to laugh to you're going to fight?
Dwayne: I don't know. If I have my friends right there, then listen. It would be like,
"Wipe that thing off your face and take those clothes off. It really offends me." Yeah.

Dwayne shared that depending on the situation, he might react differently to potentially protect
himself. If he is by himself, he might be more prone to laugh it off but if he has friends with him,
that support might spark him to feel angry and engage with the students in race-based costumes.
UC Los Angeles. For future UCLA students, I described a scenario that occurred in 2012
where someone wrote anti-Mexican and sexist graffiti on the off-campus apartment door of three
women of color, UCLA students. I asked participants how they might feel and respond if that
were to happen to them. Alexandria said she was actually familiar with this event:

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It's very hard because when I was on a tour somebody said that, that that actually
happened. And they told us don't do anything because if you do anything you're only
going to get the reaction that whoever wrote that wanted. And I'm not going to give into
that, I have to act like the bigger person, so I just have to report that and make sure
whoever did it gets the consequences that they deserve because like everybody else, I
deserve and my roommates deserve our spot in that university. We all worked hard, so
there's no need to go around and do something like that.

Similar to her thoughts about knowing that she needs to work harder as a “minority,” Alexandria
also acknowledges the advice that she was given on her UCLA tour- “don't do anything because
if you do anything you're only going to get the reaction that whoever wrote that wanted.” This
peaceful resistance is combined with using the structures in place, like reporting the incident, to
address the event. Her fellow CPHS class member and future roommate, Frida, and I discussed
her hypothetical reaction:
Frida: I would be a little, like, angry, of course, but then I would just be like ... My mom
has always taught me to just laugh at things. So I think I would just laugh at someone's
efforts. Like, they would really go that far? So I don't think I would be bothered.
Liane: And do you think you would do anything?
Frida: I don't think so. I wouldn't want to jeopardize my place in UCLA.

Students like Alexandria and Frida know what is on the line if they respond in an angry manner-
potential consequences for them, even as the victims in these scenarios. Alumni know that
injustice persists, but they worked as hard as they could to be accepted to and attend college.
With this opportunity in hand, they are understandably nervous about doing anything that might
jeopardize this chance for them and their families. While one might be hopeful that students and
their campuses could use racial bias incidents as teachable moments to improve school culture,
minoritized students are socialized and encouraged to largely ignore these events to protect
themselves and their futures.

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UC Riverside. Finally, for students enrolling at UCR, I summarized an incident that
occurred in 2016 where the Ethnic Studies department was vandalized. When asked how this
might make them feel and how they might respond, Dolan responded,
I feel like I would be kind of like, "Wow, it's happening." And I don't know. I mean, I've
never thought anything about the way people think about me. I've always been pretty
good at being... Not okay with it, but ignoring it. Or at least, being the bigger person …
So I feel like even if that would happen, I feel like I'd still be proud of [who I am]. And
I'd actually speak up about it and try to help out other people who are actually being
affected by it.

Though Dolan has learned to ignore those who try to make her think less of herself, unlike other
participants, she still offers that she would want to speak up about the event and help those who
might feel affected personally. Yayo, similarly would not feel personally impacted, but wanted to
be thoughtful of others who might:
So, I feel like... It just has to do with how people react. I just feel like I'd react to it the
same way I feel when I react to graffiti, just get a paint roller, clean up, move on. You
know? But also, I'm not going to be... I'm not going to just disregard... I have friends who
are really affected, like, dang, we've been discriminated. It's just attacking their weak
spot. I'm not going to disregard their emotions. I feel bad just because they're affected by
it and whatnot. And I for sure want to know who did it. But at the end of the day,
weakness is what they want. Right? They did it for a reason to make us feel less and if we
give them that, then they're winning. So, why even try, you know?

Similar to other participants, he worried about giving the perpetrators of these acts “what they
want.” Across these scenarios, participants invoke the language of a collective “we,” presumed
to be based on their shared ethnoracialized cultures. At the same time, they do not have tools for
considering how collective action might help bring about broader change in their campus
communities as they have been taught, like so many minoritized students, to stay on the path
towards the college degree.
In my follow up interview with nine of the original 10 Class of 2019 participants, I
presented the scenarios again. For the first lecture hall scenario, I asked participants if this, or

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similar situations, had ever happened to them during their first quarter of college. Frida at UCLA
shared that it did in fact happen to her as the only Latina in her class:
… it was my history class and so it was kind of like, it was, like, probably 150 students
and I was… but I wouldn't, didn't give it much thought. I was there to study, not, you
know.

Though it might strike many of us as odd that a course with 150 students would only have one
Latina student, Frida reminded herself that she was there to study as her own way of coping with
the situation. Other students mentioned being among majority Asian, international students. For
Yayo at Riverside, he recalled an issue that a Black friend of his had while taking a Spanish class
with majority Latinx students who were often speaking Spanish to one another, leaving her to
feel left out. He had moments where he felt similar with Asian students speaking their respective
languages,
So she just ultimately said that, you know, she felt really threatened in a sense, like
damn, do I really belong here? You know, and I kind of felt that, but it was just
ultimately, it’s like, yeah, I do belong here. I’ll be fine. It’s not the end of the world, you
know? These people could be nice. I’m not going to start assuming left and right, you
know, this and that. So yeah, I just took it and you know, little by little, started making
friends…

At first, these demographic dynamics made Yayo question whether he belonged, but he reasoned
with himself and slowly began to make friends with people who differed from him.
To follow up on the second scenario, I reminded participants of the campus bias incident
I mentioned in our first interview and asked whether they had heard about or personally
experienced racialized or gendered bias as college students. Though participants generally felt
that students of various backgrounds got along across their campuses, they also shared instances
of discomfort and even fear at certain moments. For Vida at Irvine, she recalled how the campus
alerts made her aware of safety concerns:

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… we get alerts from everything from the campus and I have seen how women are
getting– the students are getting spied on, I guess, like, tracked on, following everywhere
at night, and I’m just, like, that’s kind of crazy because I wouldn’t like that to happen to
me.

Fortunately, Vida has not had to deal with feeling unsafe as a woman student herself, but the
campus alerts have admittedly scared her but also made her more conscious about her choices,
like refraining from walking around campus at night. A student at UCLA, Alexandria, had a
situation that also made her worry about her safety. As she describes it,
So (laughs) there was this one time I was going back to my dorm from class and there
was students performing a rally for – to ummm– against the Trump and Pence
administration, and there were just some students, you know, like "come to the rally" and
stuff like that, and then there was this student that comes and walks behind a bunch of my
friends and I, and he’s just says derogatory terms to them, and then it was very shocking.
Like, I’ve never seen that, and I knew I was going to see something like that eventually,
even though that sounds terrible, but you know, there’s just a lot of students that have a
lot of different views and stuff like that. And it was just very shocking, even though it
wasn’t directly towards me, but to people who look similar to me … Well, it was a group
of big males so I wasn’t necessarily going to do anything about it … I honestly couldn’t
do anything about it, I mean, I’m not as big of a person (laughs) like, height-wise so, I'd
just rather not.

Unfortunately, Alexandria expected that an incident like this would happen to her one day.
Rather than describe the use of derogatory terms as racist and unjust, Alexandria seems to think
this behavior is the reaction of people with “different views.” Her example indicates that some
students feel a sort of inevitability to these kinds of racialized campus experiences, yet, college
preparation programs and initiatives have yet to grapple adequately with such concerns.
In the interviews with other alumni who had graduated prior to the Class of 2019, I
inquired about their racialized, gendered, and classed campus experiences. For some students,
like Andy who is a Central American junior at UCLA, these events could be very intimate. Andy
recalls a challenging conversation she had with her White roommate:
She said something that really stood out to me that I was like, whoa, I wonder if so many

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other – like, other people who are not Latino think this way, but she said that the
admission office, I guess, had much more lenient an application process for us who come
from low-income communities or from public schools, and I don’t know, it was like, to
me, like, maybe it might be true, maybe not. I’m not sure. I can’t say, but to me it just
sounded like, “oh, you guys are not as smart as us, so maybe the only reason why you
guys are here is so UCLA can have that image of, like, yes, we have low-income
students.” (laughs)

This experience of feeling inadequate when peers make assumptions about affirmative action
policies continues to be a common occurrence for low-income, students of color. Andy pushed
back in her response to her roommate, saying that she did not believe that to be true, but she
admitted that the conversation planted seeds of doubt in her mind about what her peers thought
about her and her academic abilities, especially in STEM courses. For others, they observed
racialized events from afar. Courtney, a senior at UCR, describes how Trump’s election
catalyzed a trend of older community members who did not appear to be students coming to the
center of campus as a symbol of their right to free speech:
When Trump first got elected, some students were being brave and they were wearing the
“Make America Great Again” hat. I know that that was, like, an issue for a while because
Trump supporters would come to the bell tower. – Okay, typically, people who like to
start stuff come to the bell tower because it’s a public space. And they, like, use their free
speech right to just kind of harass until they want to leave. They’re older people that have
nothing to do and it has gotten out of hand sometimes, but never to, like, a physical thing.

Though they were not daily experiences, participants had to manage racialized, hostile, and
politicized incidents both personally and from afar on their campuses.
In terms of finding ways to cope, students like Courtney and Elon channeled their
passions for addressing particular issues of inequality through their engagement with campus
organizations. Courtney joined an organization at UCR that trained her to be a peer educator for
students who experienced sexual assault and its related trauma. Though she did not feel very
connected to her cultural identity, she felt like her role as a student advocate actually had a
greater influence on her identity. Given his personal experiences with citizenship as a DACA

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recipient, Elon joined an organization at UCI focused on creating pathways for undocumented
students to work on campus. A combination of his personal experiences and his involvement
with programs for undocumented students on campus have inspired his future goals:
Right now I'm working on creating a startup company and our focus is to inform
and connect people of color or minorities. Cause you think about it, especially in the
Hispanic community, there's really no information about how somebody can do their
taxes or how they can start their own businesses. That's something that I'm trying to
create. So through an app or something like that.

These social justice-related efforts, while valued, did not seem to be the emphasis at CPHS.
Instead, students felt that their high school tended to focus on college and professional pathways.
As Courtney, a UCR senior and psychology major, described it:
[CPHS] focused more on, like, STEM-related stuff. So in preparation for like any field
that we could have possibly wanted to go into … Yeah. It was a big focus on just getting
us to college standards I would say.

Courtney felt like she learned about the academic elements of topics related to identity in
college, but also noted that she came to understand what they meant to her through her
involvement with student organizations and advocacy mentioned previously.
Changing paths. Part of the neoliberal meritocratic approach that urban charters take to
higher education is the goal that all of their students will be accepted to and attend college
following their high school graduation. As mentioned, these schools often use their 100% college
acceptance rates as a marketing tool for appealing to families and donors. Additionally, urban
charters often emphasize four-year institutions over community colleges, and community
colleges as preferable to non-traditional paths. Of the 31 total participants who enrolled at one of
the three UC institutions, four of them left their university sometime following their first quarter.
While I have included these students’ insights throughout the findings as they provide valuable
context and rich data, this section focuses on their journeys specifically. To explore the

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experiences of students who withdrew from UCI, UCLA, or UCR, I provide four brief vignettes
that detail their reflections on their high school, college, and life transitions.
Lydia. While growing up in South Central, Lydia lived with her parents, brother, and
sister in a majority low-income, Latinx neighborhood. Her mom worked in factories, while her
dad owned a tailor shop in downtown Los Angeles. Her family moved around quite often due to
increasing rents, so she attended six different elementary and middle schools which she said,
“weren’t the best.” The inconsistency impacted her academics- she believes she struggled in
developing foundational math skills without a consistent teacher but enjoyed reading since she
could carry her books around with her wherever she went. For high school, Lydia attended a
magnet school but continued to struggle academically since she was a self-proclaimed rebel at
the time. This went on until a friend suggested she apply to CPHS, which she transferred to and
attended during her 10th grade year.
Having not used laptops for classes previously, Lydia experienced a steep learning curve
with the online, module-based curriculum. As a new school, she believed she received the
attention she needed to get up to speed. Lydia made friends through her advisory of same-gender
peers and a teacher who they started and ended the day with. Though she critiqued the
disciplinary system for fostering favoritism, she also appreciated how the demerits got her to
school on time and reinforced the expectation that she carry her school I.D. From Lydia’s
perspective, “It reminded us that we had a responsibility and that being irresponsible has its own
consequences.” She also enjoyed the uniform requirement, saying it made her feel “cool” and
“professional,” but was also “a little bit too strict.”
Upon embarking on the college application process, she appreciated the support she got
in the college readiness course. Though she felt that the requirement that students research 30

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different institutions was tedious, she liked that it helped her narrow down the list. Though she
was most interested in Christian private schools, she worried about the typical majority White
populations.
So I remember when I was applying to these schools the first thing I would check was
demographics. Not only the schools, but I would also look at the city in which the school
was in, and I would always go to Wikipedia and see how many Hispanic people were in
that city alone … Because I grew up in a community where I see a lot of Brown people
walking around me, you know? And I don’t know, it’s not that I was, like, intimidated or
anything, but I just felt like I wouldn’t fit in, but I was still willing to do it, but I always
had to make sure that there were at least some Hispanic people in that community so I
could be able to relate to somebody.

Ultimately, Lydia ended up selecting UCI given its strong criminology program, which was her
intended major at the time.
Lydia attended UCI for two years and said she was actually thriving there. While her
friends were stressed out about the pace given the quarter system, she felt used to that tempo
since CPHS also functioned on the quarter schedule. Though she did well academically, she
struggled with the large campus environment as a quiet individual. With time, Lydia’s interests
changed from criminology to theology. She looked for campus spaces where she could connect
to a Christian community but they tended to be majority White. She recalls one situation that
occurred when trying to attend a club meeting:
I do remember when I went to a club, like one of those Christian meetings, and I – one of
the ladies, she had asked me like, “oh, where are you from?” and I told her I was from
South Central and immediately she started saying, “oh, South Central [emphasizes the
name in a shocked tone], and stuff like that. So, like, (laughs) then she started asking me
so many questions, like she would never get out to put gas in South Central and I thought,
alright, I’m not coming back. (laughs) So that – I think that was actually the last time I
ever tried joining the club … So yeah, so ever since, I just never – I was never involved
at UCI.

This experience with a White Christian group as well as not feeling like she could break into the
already established Latinx Christian group sparked her interest in transferring. Since she was

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doing so well, this decision to transfer shocked her parents who appreciated the reputation and
affordability that UCI provided. Despite their opinions, Lydia’s passion to study theology and
find a smaller, like-minded, spiritual community drove her to transfer to a more expensive,
private, Christian college with a large White population. Through joining affinity groups for
first-generation and commuter students, Lydia met fellow Latinx students who she could relate to
at her new institution.
Now that a few years have passed since Lydia graduated from CPHS in 2017, she hears
about her little brother’s experiences as a current CPHS student. When asked what CPHS could
have done to help better prepare her for the challenges she faced as she transitioned to college,
Lydia offered this piece of advice:
But I think it would be helpful to, I don’t know, I guess remind them to do it, that
universities are very different. You meet people from – who are so different from you,
you know? People from all over the world, you know, different backgrounds. They grew
up differently. And just remind them that their story is – that their background is equally
as awesome- that what they’re bringing to the table has the same value as somebody from
the other side of the world, you know? And I think, just help them feel empowered to
truly appreciate wherever they’ve come from.

While Lydia believes these traits should be emphasized as students prepare for college, she also
thinks CPHS did a good job reminding her to love her community- which is a memory she called
upon when the woman from the Christian meeting made degrading comments about her
neighborhood.
I learned to love my community all those years at [CPHS]. Another thing that [CPHS]
does pretty well, that whole giving back to our community … that has stuck with me so
much that every time I go to – like, I’m learning something new, or when I think about
what I want to do in the future, that’s always in the back of my mind, like, how I am
going to give back to my community through my career.

A love and appreciation for one’s community is a beautiful outcome of a high school education.
At the same time, CPHS students are taught to give back to their communities through their

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individual careers and successes. This belief system aligns with elements of the neoliberal,
meritocratic approach which emphasizes personal development rather than collectivist actions
for a more just society.
Pablo. Also from South Central and a future UCI student, Pablo grew up in a mostly
African American and Latinx area. With both parents of Mexican origin, his mom did accounting
for a liquor store and his dad worked as a truck driver. Pablo described his family as trying to
find the balance between holding on to Mexican traditions while also assimilating to American
culture. Though they were not formally educated, they wanted what was best for their children.
So, Pablo attended a private, Catholic elementary and middle school that maintained a very strict
culture and consisted of a 100% Latinx student body. While he admits that he was not as focused
on school at the time, he appreciated the small classes and the one-on-one support from teachers.
When the time came to attend high school, Pablo’s mother signed him up for CPHS
where he began as a freshman. Compared to his earlier academic performance, Pablo committed
to doing better in high school and worked hard to maintain A’s at CPHS. He found the
academics to be easy, especially since he had covered similar content during his private school
education. He appreciated continuing to have a small environment that facilitated connections to
his teachers. His private school past also made the disciplinary transition easier as many of the
rules had become second-nature, so he rarely got into trouble. When reflecting upon the college
process, Pablo noted, “But just the process, it was, I guess, easy because of the way college
counselors were helping you.” He based his research process on available majors and cost.
Though he worried about being far from home, Pablo ultimately decided to attend UCI since
they gave him the best financial aid package.

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After graduating from high school in 2018, Pablo attended UCI for a year. Pablo
described his personal and academic challenges at UCI in the following way:
I guess I could say it was, like, management because I didn’t really make good enough
time to really focus on my education. I was really just not making much time for my
classes. I would skip classwork. I would go to class, but not take notes or whatever. I’d
just go to class, just there.

Not only did Pablo struggle to engage with his courses consistently, but he also admits that he
did not study enough and ultimately blamed himself for needing to withdraw from UCI due to
his low GPA. Socially, Pablo joined a Latino fraternity as he was looking for a cultural
community he could connect to. In our conversation, Pablo did not explicitly point to his social
life as a disturbance to his education, but such commitments can be a potential source of both
connection and distraction based upon the literature (Moreno & Banuelos, 2013; Orta, 2019).
Without the necessary minimum GPA, Pablo left UCI and enrolled in a community college the
next fall semester with the ultimate goal of staying on track to transfer to a California State
University in the future. Unlike Lydia, Pablo found a cultural community that he could connect
to, yet, he struggled to focus and study. At the close of our interview, Pablo noted that he wished
CPHS had emphasized dual enrollment during high school. While at UCI, he noticed that his
peers had earned college credits prior to enrolling. Though CPHS provides its students with
extensive support, like the guidance offered in the college readiness class, there is still a myriad
of other ways that inequalities are maintained across schools through access to opportunities
such as dual enrollment and AP courses.
Natalie. Like Pablo and Lydia, Natalie also grew up in a South Central neighborhood
with her family which included her parents and three sisters. Reflecting upon her earlier
educational experiences attending public schools with majority Latinx and African American
student populations, Natalie reminisced about her elementary school fondly:

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I really liked my experience in elementary because – well, just the teachers were really
nice. I’ve always had, like, all my good memories come from elementary because of
teachers. They were just more involved with the students.

This positive experience was juxtaposed against her time in middle school which she described
as “ghetto.”
The teachers didn’t really care about the kids, or just education, so a majority of the time
the students would do whatever they wanted, and I didn’t really learn anything, which is
why it kind of, like, affected me in high school.

One positive outcome from this experience was that one day, while in the middle school parking
lot, her dad overheard other parents talking about CPHS. He liked what he heard and signed up
Natalie. Natalie had her heart set on attending another high school, but appreciates that her
parents stuck with their decision despite her dissatisfaction at the time.
As a freshman, Natalie was a part of her high school’s first class of students. She recalls
that the school was fairly loose in terms of rules and regulations in that first year. As Natalie
describes it,
The first year, like, all the teachers were different. The principal was different. It was just
the way the school was built. It was very different because the students were able to
choose their own schedule. They were able to decide what time we would come in and
what time we would leave.

This flexibility changed when a new CEO took over CPHS in her sophomore year, bringing in a
new principal, a mostly new team of teachers, and stricter rules. When the merit and demerit
system was instituted, it was very hard for her classmates to adjust to the changes. Natalie
developed close bonds with her teachers but also noticed that her grades were not as strong in her
first year. In her second year and the ones that followed, she noticed the following shift towards
a greater emphasis on GPA and getting accepted into competitive universities.
Natalie shared that she started thinking about college because of CPHS. The guidance
counselor was immensely helpful in the application process. At the same time, she felt that they

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emphasized attending a four-year institution while neglecting to offer other options- like the
potential benefits of attending a community college. As Natalie described it,
When a majority of the students were planning to go to community [college], they would
just force them to try to – well, not force them, but they would make it a requirement to
apply to universities even if they don’t – even if they don’t plan on going.

As a result of this four-year college emphasis, Natalie felt there was a stigma of being “dumb” if
students wanted to attend other higher education options, even if it was for financial reasons.
Within the four-year colleges, Natalie noticed a hierarchy:
I got into Cal State, but [CPHS] makes it seem like it has to be a university, like UC or a
private school, in order for you to really be considered smart or out there, so I didn’t
really consider any of the Cal States.

Even though Natalie was accepted into a nearby California State University that was closer to
home and potentially more affordable for her and her family, the school’s culture ultimately
informed her decision to attend UCR. When asked about whether campus demographics were a
factor, Natalie shared the following insight:
I did go and visit UCR, and I saw that there were a lot of like Latinos. It was very
diverse. UCR is very diverse, so I really liked that about the school because also a lot of
the other private universities that I did apply to, it was majority White, and because
[CPHS] didn’t – well, I wasn’t really exposed to – a lot of – I was mostly exposed to,
like, Latinos and African-Americans my whole life, so going to a different environment
with a bunch of White people, I just didn’t feel comfortable. So I decided to go to UCR
because it was the most diverse.

In comparison to UCI and UCLA in terms of the sample for this study, UCR is far more racially
diverse with the largest population of Latinx students. Natalie recognized and valued this context
in her college decision-making process.
When she enrolled at UCR, Natalie struggled with the adjustment as a first-generation
college student.
Well, it was kind of difficult because I’m the first one in my family to go to a university,

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so I didn’t really know what to expect. Like, they – I was basically left at a dorm and I
was forced to bond with my roommates, and I just had to, you know, get out there.

Compared to the small environment at CPHS where it was easier to make friends, college was a
new environment. Nervous about making the academic transition, Natalie did not get very
involved at UCR in her first year.
Since high school, Natalie knew she wanted to become a nurse. Even though UCR does
not have a nursing program, CPHS staff still encouraged her to get her bachelor’s degree in as
close a topic as possible. Natalie met with a counselor at UCR who shared the opposite advice-
saying that she would only be taking extra classes that would not advance her career interests.
During this time, Natalie did not pass her math class and at UCR, this meant that students were
then limited in terms of the courses they could take and the potential majors in which they could
enroll. Unable to take classes in topics of interest, like biology, Natalie lost her academic
motivation and performed poorly in her courses as she finished her first year. At the close of her
first year, Natalie decided to withdraw from UCR, and enroll at a nearby community college in
the Riverside area. Eventually, Natalie moved back to Los Angeles and transferred to a technical
community college in the city where she is preparing for the nursing school exam.
Part of the undergirding belief of the neoliberal meritocracy for urban charter schools is
that with enough academic training and discipline that removes distractions, historically
minoritized students will have access to the same competitive, highly ranked institutions that the
wealthy have always attended. While fostering a college-going culture is an admirable goal, it
can also be limiting in terms of what is defined as successful. While reflecting on her decision to
attend UCR, Natalie had the following thoughts, “I was able to realize after my first year of UCR
it just – it would have been a better option for me, especially financially.” As a member of the

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first class, Natalie had these experiences a few years ago, but she has watched them impact her
sister who is now a CPHS student. She worries that the community college stigma is persisting:
[CPHS] told my sister that – because she right now – well, she’s considering college and
then the counselor is all like, “oh, are you over that phase that you want to go to
community [college]?” and it’s like, it’s not even a phase. It's just because she doesn’t
know– she doesn’t know her financial position and stability.

The four-year college emphasis fostered Natalie’s regrets about her college decisions. She
wished she had attended community college immediately after high school so that she could have
saved money while taking the same general education courses. She did not feel adequately
informed about the costs beyond tuition, such as those associated with housing, and how they
would mean that she needed to find a job and take out loans. Finally, she sacrificed immediately
pursuing her career goal of becoming a nurse to attend a more competitive and valued UC
institution. When neoliberal meritocracy creates rigid definitions of success, it can actually limit
opportunity for students without being cognizant of their real, material challenges (i.e. finances)
and their goals that may not require a bachelor’s degree yet -as the recent global pandemic has
shown us- should be valued (i.e. nursing).
Hamilton. Hamilton, a fellow graduate of the class of 2016 and South Central resident,
described his neighborhood in the following manner:
There was a lot of crime, a lot of gang violence, but you know, it’s gotten better over the
years. There’s not as much theft as here. There’s still some of the gang violence going on,
but not as much as before where you couldn’t (laughs) go to certain areas or else, you
know, you can be in real trouble.

While growing up, Hamilton lived with his parents and multiple extended family members
including his aunts, uncles, and his grandma before she passed away, all living in what he
described as a “small household.” Hamilton remembered his elementary school as new and close
to home, allowing him to walk to school. Largely positive, Hamilton’s elementary school

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experience was quite different compared to middle school. Hamilton recalls his middle school as
pretty chaotic:
There was a lot going on. It was the most eventful I guess you can say. There was
constant fights. It was weird because some of the students would organize little fight
clubs in the stairways. Yeah, it was funny if you think about it now, like kids making,
you know, random fight bets and stuff. Yeah, and it was funny because every time there
was a fight, you’d see the entire school -just a wave of kids- run to one side of the
campus all at once, and it was just the craziest thing. But it was pretty bad there that the
staff – it was severely understaffed, and I remember one point there was a kid who got
upset by a comment that I made, and he actually pulled a knife on me, so that was
pretty… pretty interesting (laughs).

When we consider the state of education and students’ safety, these types of experiences that
Hamilton shared should be extremely concerning. One must wonder how children can learn in
environments that foster fear and violence. When Hamilton began applying to high schools, his
girlfriend at the time suggested he check out CPHS- a new school with an affiliation to a local,
well-known university. Hamilton applied and attended as a part of their inaugural class.
During the first year at CPHS, Hamilton remembers the less structured environment that
Natalie reflected upon. Given the online approach, students were allowed to leave school early if
they finished their assigned modules ahead of schedule. He also remembers that students were
acting out by getting into fights and talking back to the teachers who did not seem to know how
to respond. For example, Hamilton recalls the following story that occurred during his first year
at CPHS:
I remember one time there was a fight in the bathroom and the principal was out in the
hallway and it was insane because they just heard the commotion coming from the
bathroom, and I see the principal at the time turn around and just throw – literally she
threw her walkie talkie on the floor for some weird reason and she booked it to the
bathroom to stop the fight. So even though they weren’t prepared for all the situations
that happened, they tried their best to handle them, you know?

When the new leadership and teaching team came in during his second year, Hamilton noticed
“extreme, drastic changes” with the uniform and demerit rules.

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As it related to the college application process, Hamilton appreciated the support but also
questioned whether college was the best next step for him:
So the college application process was actually – now that I look back at it, I think it was
actually pretty good. It was definitely confusing at first, because you know, it’s a new
thing for all of us. And, for example, me personally, I wasn’t one that was planning on
college. I didn’t even know – at the time I didn’t want to go to college.

Through the college readiness course, Hamilton learned about various colleges and grew
interested in the potential freedoms associated with a college lifestyle to take the classes you
want and meet new people. Hamilton ended up applying to a variety of schools and was actually
surprised when he was admitted to UCR and given a strong financial aid package since he was
told by the college counselor that it was a “reach” school, which describes schools that may be
more challenging to be accepted into based on the student’s qualifications (e.g., SAT scores,
GOA, etc.).
Hamilton attended UCR for two years. He really enjoyed the campus and felt that he met
a lot of great people. At the same time, Hamilton also faced challenges with mental health for the
first time as a college student, especially during his second year. He describes this experience in
the following way:
I was experiencing a lot of anxiety, stress. Something I had honestly never felt before
until I got to college which is something I feel [CPHS] should have worked on. That’s
something that’s – that I realized is now important. Like, talking about like, – going more
in-depth about the mental health issues that can occur once you’re out here in college,
like culture shock. Just trying to socialize with people with different cultural
backgrounds, the same thing as culture shock, but yeah, I feel like they should have
stressed more on the mental issues that come with college, like the stress from all the
work and it was just a lot … Like, I had a period where I just stopped talking to people. I
withdrew from everybody and just – I don’t know, I just felt socially awkward. I still kind
of do, but I know I can talk really well. Like, I’m well-spoken for the most part
considering my background of where I came from.

Especially based upon the last part of Hamilton’s statement, there seemed to be a concern he
carried where his academic concerns created stress and anxiety that perhaps made him question

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his abilities, maybe even in connection to “where [he] came from.” Hamilton’s academic and
mental health difficulties resulted in him withdrawing from UCR after two years and enrolled at
a nearby community college in Riverside.
Hamilton went on to explain how the transition from a close-knit community of CPHS
students to a UC campus caused him uneasiness.
Going from Latinx students and all that other stuff to UC campus I would say it
was pretty interesting because I did notice a majority of people here who are of Asian
nationality, a lot of White – not many African-American or Latino students, which is
pretty interesting. I guess that’s kind of what contributed to my social anxiety because I
guess since we’re coming from a place where you know everybody and how they role
and basically knowing that they live in the same circumstances – like, almost the same
circumstances that we live – a lot of us came from ghetto (laughs) areas. That’s why. And
here we hear people like, “oh yeah, you know, I come from, like, the Valley,” “I come
from the Bay,” like, these nice places (laughs) for the most part, and I guess that’s what’s
like, – I don’t know, coming I guess from South Central LA you feel like – I don’t know,
people look at you like funny. Like, “oh, you’re from LA? Wow. Oh, my God.” Like, it’s
so – I mean, it’s so strange. That was definitely, I guess, what got to me.

When Hamilton encountered classmates from LA, they shared a common bond but more often
than not, he came across others who made assumptions about his experiences in the “hood” and
by extension, made assumptions about him. Hamilton continued to observe these racialized and
classist differences around campus,
Like, everyone was definitely doing their own thing, which made it difficult to try to
interact with people because people were so, like, on their own track, and I did notice that
they were people of higher socioeconomic statuses that were – they felt you can just feel
their privilege beaming off of them. (laughs) Like, they would kind of scoff at the others
and just – I don’t know. They were students. You can tell which ones were the wealthier
students and how they didn’t interact with, I guess, the lower class kids (laughs).

Though UCR has the highest Latinx population, Hamilton still experienced feelings of isolation
and discomfort.
Hamilton wished that CPHS could have better prepared them for these realities, but also
for the “adulting” skills they would need as independent college students:

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Mental health should have been stressed more, time management should have been
stressed more. Like, that’s something that I struggle with so much, trying to just manage
my time doing work, trying to – I live by myself out here, so I have to go get groceries
and just go shopping for clothes, and it’s – (laughs) it was pretty tough. I guess they
should have stressed more independence, like, how to live independently and
successfully. … Because they treated us like straight up children the whole entire time we
were there and it felt like that even more with the whole demerit system.

Though many no-excuses charter schools believe their strict rules and high expectations are
creating environments free of distractions away from learning, this high level of oversight might
be a disservice to their graduates who have to quickly learn to be independent, self-starters in the
college environment. At the close of his interview, I asked Hamilton what advice he might offer
to CPHS about how to better prepare future graduates so that they do not have the same
experience the he did, and he offered the following sage advice:
Yeah, just straight up tell the students like, “hey, remember where you’re coming from.”
Like, people are going to think less of you because of where you came from. They’re
going to think that you’re uneducated, that you’re going to start problems, that you don’t
care about school even, even though you’re in the same university.

These assumptions made Hamilton question himself. Microaggressive comments and
interactions can catalyze minoritized students to doubt who they are and their abilities. When
Hamilton had trouble maintaining his grades, it negatively impacted his GPA and he became
vulnerable to mental health concerns.
Hamilton also faced challenges interacting with people who were different from himself,
which undoubtedly was intensified by the negative comments his peers made and the judgmental
attitudes they carried about his background. He mentioned this concern as another potential area
that CPHS could improve upon:
Just be real with the students, don’t be like, “oh, everything’s going to be fine, just do
this, try to make a lot of friends and network.” Like, they did tell us to network, but they
didn’t tell us how hard it would be to network coming from different backgrounds, and
yeah, I guess what [CPHS] can do is try to educate students on other backgrounds besides
the ones we’re already familiar with, you know? Maybe give us some background on

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Asian culture, Hindu culture, like, anything, like yeah, just (laughs) get more cultural
background, like information on other cultures, you know? Because I did feel culturally
uneducated on a lot of things, so there was a lot of cultural biases that I had to realize for
myself and get over. So yeah, definitely do that, like [CPHS] should at least tell them
like, “You’re from here, people are going to assume this of you, but you should know
who you are, what you’re capable of, and what you came here to do. You’re not here to
please others. You’re not here to convince others that you’re worthy of being in this
college. Like, you got accepted for a reason. You’re both there for a reason.”

Learning from his own experiences, Hamilton provides useful insight into how CPHS, and other
high schools, can and should give their racially and economically minoritized students
confidence in who they are and where they are from to manage hostile campus environments.
Students like Hamilton would also find it useful to expand their purview concerning other
cultures that they may not interact with given the limitations created by racially and
economically isolated schools and communities. Knowledge of self and others, as well as an
institutional lens for how segregation started and continues to persist, could make the difference
in regard to healthy college transitions and student success.
Summary of the Explanatory Model of the College Transition
Based upon the insights shared by the participants in this study, I developed a model of
the college transition for Latinx, urban charter school graduates. This chapter reviewed key
components of a grounded theory model including the central phenomenon, causal, and
intervening conditions as well as the consequences. The purpose of this model is to understand
some of the key factors that influence the central phenomenon of interest- the college transition
process, specifically for Latinx students who have graduated from an urban, charter high school.
The causal conditions, which describe particular constructs and contexts that influence
how the central phenomenon occurs based on patterns in the data, were informed by students’
pre-high school experiences. Participants’ earlier educational experiences in elementary and
middle school, in addition to the extent to which these spaces facilitated interactions with

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individuals from similar or different racial/ethnic backgrounds, are two of the main causal
conditions. The third causal condition includes familial and personal experiences interacting with
or being impacted by systems of oppression based upon race/ethnicity, class, citizenship, and
gender. Intervening conditions describe the high school context that all of the participants have
in common.
While there are many facets of one’s high school experience that are important, the
intervening conditions focus on the constructs that inform how students understand and engage
in the college transition process in particular. Such constructs include the academic curriculum
and the extent to which it prepares students for the rigors and academic realities of college. The
development of college knowledge given extensive research about the “hidden curriculum” and
the related challenges of acclimating to college environments for minoritized students informs
another key construct. I also reviewed the interactions, perspectives, and implications of strict
disciplinary policies on assumptions about what it means for minoritized students to be “college-
ready.” Disciplinary features, such as the merit and demerit system as well as the uniform
expectations matter for how students come to understand not only college readiness, but also
concepts related to professionalism that they carry into adulthood.
The last part of the model includes the main consequence, or outcome, that influences
how the college transition can occur based upon the causal and intervening conditions. I assert
that the key consequence for students who share fairly similar early life experiences as well as
their charter high school socialization is an orientation towards neoliberal meritocracy. While
meritocracy of the past was based upon the premise that hard work resulted in educational,
professional, and economic success, participants knew this idea to be a falsehood as much of the
empirical data has proven related to the persistence of inequality. By attending a charter school,

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which are typically steeped in neoliberalism through their focus on individualism and
competition, students come to see that their best chance of success is by pursuing higher
education- specifically, by attending college. Rather than see this pursuit through a collectivist
lens, students believe their college degree will benefit them and their family, and perhaps by
extension, provide a positive example for society that is not commonly shared. Today,
minoritized students know that inequality exists and they continue to see how disparities persist
as they transition to campuses that force them to engage with students from a range of
racial/ethnic and class backgrounds. Instead of understanding these problems as a result of
broader structures, they largely view inequality through an individualistic lens which tells them
they must work harder than their Whiter and wealthier peers to achieve success for themselves
and their families. In the next and final chapter, I provide the implications of neoliberal
meritocracy for our students, high schools, and the future of higher education.
Chapter 5
Summary, Discussion, Implications, and Conclusion
I begin this final chapter by summarizing the dissertation study, including the central
purpose, the grounded theory model, and its related findings based upon student voice. I then
place the findings in dialogue with extant theories related to the main consequence: neoliberal
meritocracy. I offer how this theorized socialization process is similar and different to social
practices and systems related to meritocracy, privilege/oppression, and critical consciousness.
Compared to analyses of the past, I present these topics in relation to the current neoliberal
environment that has proven to be exacerbated in educational spaces, like charter schools. I then
provide the implications for socializing charter school graduates, and perhaps many other young
people, towards neoliberal meritocracy for students themselves, high schools, as well as colleges

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and universities. Finally, I offer opportunities for future research that take more proactive
approaches to change the tide so that students can live as Love (2019) suggests by thriving,
rather than simply surviving.
Summary of the Study
The purpose of this study is to understand how Latinx students who graduated from an
urban charter school transitioned from high school to college. More specifically, I explored how
Latinx graduates made sense of the transition from a high school made up of 80% Latinx
students, to one of three UC campuses with distinctly different racial and ethnic student
demographics. Using grounded theory, I conducted 31 total interviews with 23 students. This
included 17 total interviews (including first and follow up) with graduates from the Class of
2019 and 14 from the other three classes of CPHS graduates. Four of the 14 students from the
other three classes (Class of 2018, 2017, and 2016) started attending one of the three UC
campuses after high school, but have since withdrawn for a variety of reasons. These reasons
include, but are not limited to, difficulties with academics and anxiety with making the social
transition given campus demographics. With graduates from the Class of 2019, I interviewed
nine students during the summer prior to their first quarter of college and then conducted follow
up interviews with eight of them to gather their insights about their preparation for and
engagement with the college transition process. In total, 10 students attended UCI, four attended
UCLA, and nine attended UCR. Upon conducting an iterative analytical process, the data-
informed a model of the college transition for Latinx, urban charter school graduates.
Summary of the Model
As I collected and analyzed the data using a grounded theory approach, I developed a
model (see Figure 2) that described the college transition process for Latinx graduates of urban

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charter schools. The grounded theory model that I elected to use includes four parts: the central
phenomenon, causal conditions, intervening conditions, and the consequence(s). Here, the
central phenomenon is the college transition process which describes how students move from
their high school graduation to getting acclimated to their college campus. Each part of the
model relates to the central phenomenon and informs how it occurs.
Next, the causal conditions describe the constructs and contexts that matter for how the
college transition unfolds. These include participants’ familial and personal experiences
interacting with or being impacted by systems of oppression based upon race/ethnicity, class,
citizenship, and gender. Other causal conditions are pre-high school experiences in elementary
and middle school as well as whether these educational environments fostered interactions with
peers and educators from similar and different racial/ethnic and economic backgrounds.
Intervening conditions are those that unite participants in some manner that is meaningful
for the college transition process. In this study, the intervening conditions describe students’
shared time at CPHS. Participants spanned various class years and did not attend high school at
the same time, yet their collective understanding of the school’s culture, traditions, and major
shifts are meaningful. They matter for how students develop college aspirations, complete the
application process, and select the institution where they plan to enroll the following fall.
Finally, the main consequence is an outcome of the causal and intervening conditions and
how they inform the college transition process. Based upon the model, the key consequence for
students, especially those who share similar early life experiences and their charter high school
socialization, is potential alignment with the ideal purported by neoliberal meritocracy. In this
case, neoliberal meritocracy refers to how students come to see attending college and earning a
degree is their best chance of achieving success for themselves and their family in an inequitable

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society. This approach emphasizes individualism that benefits students and their families rather
than collectivism which speaks to benefits for the greater good.
Summary of the Findings
Causal conditions. Participants’ college transition processes were informed by their pre-
high school and CPHS experiences. In terms of their pre-high school experiences that influenced
how they engaged in the college transition process later on, pivotal personal and familial
experiences as well as elementary and middle school memories proved to be important. More
specifically, students detailed how their parents, siblings, and broader family structures, as well
as the neighborhoods where they grew up, mattered for how they thought about education and
their future college aspirations. As one student shared, but multiple other participants related to,
“My dad got deported, so that changed my family a lot.” Informed by broader policies and
political environments, events like these are formative for individuals’ perspectives and
experiences in general, as well as their relationships to educational institutions. Teachers and
their peers in elementary and middle school also informed their perspectives, and often, the
decisions they and their families made related to ultimately attending CPHS. In addition to
influencing students’ perceptions of education broadly and college more specifically, these
factors also provided moments for participants to discuss their conceptions of inequality and
opportunity based on their reflections regarding their personal experiences and their observations
of their family’s experiences. The extent to which participants interacted with people from
similar or different racial/ethnic and economic backgrounds in earlier segments of their lives
helped determine how prepared they felt for the diversity they presumed would be on their
college campus. Segregated neighborhoods and schools tended to limit interactions among
people of different backgrounds.

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Intervening conditions. Following these earlier influences, participants discussed how
their shared time as CPHS students impacted their perceptions and decision-making processes
related to college. The academic curriculum, development of college knowledge, and the “no-
excuses” disciplinary policies all influenced how students viewed the college transition process.
CPHS is part of a CMO that emphasizes personal learning through online modules while offering
in-person classroom support. While participants seemed confident in this approach as a tool for
learning before attending college, first-year students and older CPHS alumni did not believe that
it prepared them for all aspects of college academics. For example, they struggled with content
that was not covered in high school as well as the skills needed to independently prepare for
exams. Since CPHS is also a relatively new school, alumni reflections also indicated that the
school was improving over time by preparing students with syllabi in their courses that
functioned similarly to syllabi in college, for example.
Relatedly in terms of college knowledge, students felt they developed these skills through
the required college readiness course. Alumni appreciated the attention they could dedicate to the
complex application and financial aid processes as well as the guidance they received from their
instructors. Just as CPHS courses normalized syllabi through the academic courses, they also got
students acclimated to office hours as a means of connecting with their teachers and advocating
for themselves when they needed support. As a result of these efforts, one student shared a
sentiment of gratitude expressed by many participants: “I guess the college readiness, like, I
guess that really helped.” One area where CPHS did not mirror college academics was the
absence of textbooks. When students transitioned to college and were expected to take notes and
study textbooks, they struggled without much prior experience. Participants largely found the
college readiness course to be helpful as they developed their college knowledge, but noted that

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there was not a big enough emphasis on maintaining one’s mental health as a part of the college
preparation process.
The final intervening condition involved how students grappled with the no-excuses
discipline policy at CPHS. Strict, overly prescriptive discipline policies are a major point of
debate concerning charter schools. Having experienced it themselves, students had nuanced
perspectives on the extent to which such policies helped or hurt their preparation for college,
careers, and life. Alumni from the first graduating class spoke about the major changes to the
policies that they witnessed first-hand. Under the first leadership team, CPHS students had a lot
of flexibility and choice in terms of when they would arrive at school and how they chose to
complete their individual online assignments. Graduates spoke about close bonds with teachers
and an appreciation for their independence. They also noted the chaos that occurred in terms of
teachers’ lack of behavior management abilities and students' unruly behaviors with fights as an
extreme consequence of the school culture at the time.
When a new leadership team took over, it came with staff who students needed to build
relationships with and a set of strict rules that resulted in merits and benefits when they were
followed or demerits and consequences when they were not. As time went on and incoming
classes got acclimated to the no-excuses approach, alumni discussed how the uniform and
behavior policies could simultaneously feel like a system of control and also feel like it was
preparing them for the responsibility and professionalism the “real world” would require of
them.
Consequence. The causal and intervening conditions inform patterns of experiences and
perspectives shared by participants concerning the college transition process. Ultimately, this
dissertation study finds that students’ reflections upon their personal, familial, and educational

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experiences (especially their collective time spent at CPHS) contribute to some alignment
between their personal belief systems and the concept of neoliberal meritocracy. Participants
communicated neoliberal, meritocratic perspectives through the ways that they came to
understand themselves, their connections to their cultural communities, and ultimately, how they
discussed notions of merit and inequality.
Discussion
Though the model and its related findings are quite detailed and complex as explored in
the previous chapters, the overarching idea is that CPHS and its college-preparatory approach are
helping to prepare their first-generation, low-income, and racially minoritized graduates to
navigate injustice by (1) providing detailed guidance throughout the college application and
financial aid processes, (2) informing students about potential barriers in college, and (3)
emphasizing how students improve their lives, as well as those of their families, through their
success in college and their future careers. Yet, while CPHS facilitates open discussion about
inequality in and beyond students’ communities, students do not ultimately view these issues as
systemic, institutionalized problems. An individualistic orientation to seeing and solving societal
concerns is not simply derived from CPHS, but is also informed by broader neoliberal influences
that emphasize individualistic rather than collectivist approaches to social justice and equity
(Lipman, 2011; Love, 2019; Oeur, 2017).
Theoretical Contributions
The grounded theory model that describes neoliberal meritocracy as a consequence of the
college transition process for Latinx graduates of an urban charter school makes multiple
contributions to the education research field. First, the data from these participants’ voices
nuance extant theories about high school socialization processes by placing charter schools into

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what has thus far been a private school versus public school binary. Largely, private schools
socialize students for the intangibles of privileged lifestyles while traditional public school
students who have strong academic capacities still struggle when encountering the informal
boundary-making that occurs in class and race-based spaces, especially on elite college
campuses (Jack, 2019; Khan, 2010).
Second, the concept of “neoliberal meritocracy” in particular has yet to be applied to
socialization theories in education, especially based upon what it means for how minoritized
students transition to higher education. Neoliberalism speaks to a focus on individualism and
market logics. Simultaneously, the underlying assumption of meritocracy encourages even
systematically marginalized students to believe that their individual successes will bring about
social justice- and charter schools are an important factor for how students are socialized towards
such beliefs.
Finally, the grounded theory model describing the college transition process derived from
this study has broader implications for considering the purpose of secondary and higher
education in today’s society. If the purpose of high school and college is purely for attaining a
job, what hope does that leave for creating a more just society when systemic barriers to college
access and success remain? In other words, what does society lose when students are trained to
simply navigate unjust systems as they are, rather than supporting students to understand and
change structures of privilege and oppression?
High school socialization. While there have been many scholars who have approached
the topic of high school socialization, I focus on the three particular works by Carter (2005),
Khan (2010), and most recently, Jack (2019). Through an analysis of Latinx and Black youth and
their ethnoracial cultures and boundaries in relation to schooling and education, Carter (2005)

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found that participants largely understood education as necessary for attaining success. The
variation in their approaches to schooling stemmed from their personal experiences that informed
their racial ideologies. Carter (2005) found that most participants aligned with one of three
educational belief systems: (1) cultural mainstreamers who tended to assimilate to dominant
ways of being, (2) noncompliant believers who tended to push back against dominant systems,
and finally (3) cultural straddlers who had the abilities to navigate both worlds.
In considering the participants in this study from CPHS who tended to be higher
performing in their capacity to gain acceptance to the fairly competitive UC system, Carter
(2005) may have considered them to be cultural mainstreamers or cultural straddlers. Many of
these students learned how to avoid serving detention by following the strict norms of the
uniform and discipline systems. They remained on track with the intensity of the college
readiness class by completing module tasks and meeting deadlines. Many probably also gained
familiarity with the greeter system, which required them to introduce themselves to visitors at
any given time. Part of the no-excuses approach that many charter schools adopt involves some
level of control over students, with the hope that students will abide by practices of responsibility
and professionalism as high school students in anticipation of using those practices themselves as
college students. Participants also spoke about developing confidence in themselves and their
cultural identity as high schoolers through communal spaces such as same-gendered advisory
and student organizations like the Spanish Honor Society. They continued to pursue such spaces
in college through ethnic and gender studies courses as well as culture-based student clubs.
Therefore, it seems that CPHS students have aspects of their approaches to education that
encompass the skills Carter (2005) associates with both mainstreamers and straddlers. Yet, that
alone does not define these students. They recognize and can speak about inequality. They know

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that the world is not fair and that college is no different. They know they must navigate college
by working harder than their peers, especially their more privileged classmates.
Unlike Carter (2005) who used the voices of minoritized students to understand
socialization processes in high school, Khan (2010) studied how students from Whiter and
wealthier backgrounds were socialized in a private school setting. Khan’s (2010) work
specifically advanced how we understand concepts of privilege and meritocracy. As he and many
scholars before him outline, merit is not innate and what a society comes to believe is
meritorious depends on the context. In the U.S. context, elements of merit are associated with
gaining access to highly competitive institutions. Khan’s (2010) work further emphasizes that
such access is based upon privilege rather than ability and that elite private schools help socialize
their graduates for elite college environments. Though privilege of the past could be marked by
one’s knowledge of and behaviors within exclusive spaces, such as operas and fine art museums,
privilege today functions differently. Through his ethnography of an elite private school, Khan
(2010) finds that “the school produces ‘meritorious’ traits of students” (p. 9) by outlining how
privilege today is a created “ease” of being that once taught, is meant to appear natural.
For CPHS students, they have access to many college-preparation resources like the
college readiness course, the greeter system, and now, a school that looks more like a start-up
company given their charter school status and their CMO affiliation. While participants spoke
about their development of college knowledge and the support of college-focused staff, CPHS
students are not fully socialized like truly privileged students who develop the “ease” that Khan
(2010) refers to. Participants in his study learned the nuances of the hidden curriculum through
early experiences of travel and adjusting to elite social circles with their families prior to high
school, followed by opportunities to live independently in dorms and attend formal dinners twice

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per week, for example, as students. So while CPHS students learned how to talk to strangers
through the greeter system, they did so by memorizing a general script and participating in fairly
limited interactions with visitors and donors. In teaching navigational skills, charters are
attempting to mimic the “ease” that private schools impart on their students, but as some alumni
mentioned, these interactions feel far from natural.
Jack (2019) notes a similar difference in his study of a group of students he labels as “the
privileged poor.” These students come from similar backgrounds as the CPHS participants but
they attend private, elite high schools. Jack (2019) compares these students to the “doubly
disadvantaged” who are just as capable, but attend public schools. While Jack (2019) places
traditional and charter school students in this shared category, I would argue that students
attending urban charters have some college-preparatory advantages. While CPHS alumni do not
attain the natural ease of privilege as the students from Khan’s (2010) work do, they do benefit
from a college focus and related resources through college counseling staff, courses, and
programs that many students at traditional public schools may not have access to. Ultimately,
this study contributes to recent theories about high school socialization in anticipation for college
by adding nuance to the previously established private versus public school dichotomy.
Participants' experiences offer how urban charter schools are providing their graduates with
navigational tools that, while helpful, are still insufficient when compared to the “ease” that
private schools continue to impart on privileged students.
Neoliberal meritocracy versus other theories of neoliberalism. Concepts of
meritocracy and neoliberalism have been theorized largely as independent yet interrelated ideas
(Au, 2016; Khan, 2010; Lipman, 2011; Melamed, 2011; Viana & da Silva, 2018; Warikoo,
2016). A few theories in education literature have considered how these concepts can work in

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tandem to inform how schools, educators, and students come to understand themselves and their
futures. This section seeks to explore how recent concepts of neoliberal multiculturalism (Au,
2016; Melamed, 2011) and Black resilience neoliberalism (BRN) (Clay, 2019) share similarities
and divergences with the grounded theory at the heart of this dissertation- neoliberal meritocracy.
Specifically, I provide what these theories mean for how Latinx students are socialized and
prepared for the transition to college.
Neoliberal multiculturalism (Au, 2016; Melamed, 2011) refers to the intertwined
relationship between neoliberalism and racial capitalism. Race continues to be a major factor
impacting how economic and social processes result in racialized inequalities. Yet even while
such processes are happening, multiculturalism dictates that neoliberal policies have the power to
create a post-racist society where opportunity is available to all, equally (Melamed, 2011).
Charter schools are one such example. As mentioned previously, urban charter schools in
particular are marketed to families, communities, and donors as educational spaces that can
overcome inequality, despite students’ zip codes. Charter school advocates propose that longer
school days, no-excuses disciplinary policies, and uniforms all contribute to creating highly
academic environments that free students of distractions and allow them to catch up to their
peers (Merseth, 2009). Au (2016) uses the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism to describe
Meritocracy 2.0 which uses failure to “justify neoliberal conceptions of individualist educational
attainment and the denial of structural inequalities” and to decide which policies and practices
should be enforced upon disempowered students and communities labeled as “failures” (p. 42).
Therefore, neoliberal multiculturalism and by extension Meritocracy 2.0 help describe
how CPHS graduates develop such a positive disposition when responding to hypothetical and
real-life incidents of racial bias on their college campuses. As you may recall, many participants

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said they would respond to such events by ignoring them and focusing on their academics.
Minoritized students have been trained to see such incidents through an individual lens, where
they must grapple and overcome it alone. Alternatively, students rarely consider why these types
of issues at parties, in dorm rooms, and in classes have happened to minoritized students for
decades as a result of structural inequalities. Neoliberal meritocracy has been used through this
grounded theory model to describe the perspective that participants share when considering
inequality. More broadly, neoliberal multiculturalism describes how charter schools justify their
focus on educational elements, such as standardized testing, as a means for fostering individual
competition towards college success.
In addition to concepts of neoliberal multiculturalism and the related idea of Meritocracy
2.0 (Au, 2016; Melamed, 2011), Clay (2019) recently contributed the notion of Black resilience
neoliberalism (BRN). Through his ethnographic fieldwork with Black students engaged in the
early stages of a youth participatory action research project, Clay (2019) found that BRN
describes how participants explained concepts related to racism, inequality, and social change.
Similar to neoliberal meritocracy and this current study of Latinx charter school graduates, Clay
(2019) witnessed how Black students normalized and even valorized how Black people and
Black communities navigated inequality. Another common element is how students did not, and
perhaps could not, acknowledge how structural forces created racial inequality.
While the majority of Clay’s (2019) participants attended public schools, the author also
speaks to how the pro-charter Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, uses discursive strategies to
position Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as proponents of the school
choice model which ignores the historical fact that they were created out of hundreds of years of
racism that kept Black people from accessing educational opportunity. Both BRN and neoliberal

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multiculturalism point to the complex ways that communities of color are engaged strategically
by neoliberal supporters in ways that negate addressing systemic racism and oppression.
Neoliberal meritocracy contributes to these discussions by adding how today’s students may be
better able to grapple with issues of inequality through connecting to cultural communities and
knowledge via particular aspects of their high school and college environments, yet such spaces
need to emphasize structural analysis and collectivist actions to push back against the
consequences of neoliberalism.
The purpose of secondary and higher education. These concepts of neoliberalism and
meritocracy advance understanding concerning how some minoritized students are being
socialized towards success in secondary and post-secondary environments. Yet educational
equity requires educators, practitioners, and researchers to pursue justice rather than neoliberal
ideals of individual success. The work of Seider and Graves (2020) as well as Love (2019) offer
just a few examples of what a more socially just education system could look like, especially as
we prepare students for college.
In their recently published book, Seider and Graves (2020) share their four-year study of
the critical consciousness development of hundreds of youth attending five urban charter high
schools. Critical consciousness is defined as “the process through which people become critically
aware of the social and historical roots of structures that perpetuate their marginalization, and
take action to address this oppression” (Godfrey et al., 2019, p. 525). These particular schools
served majority Latinx and Black as well as low-income student populations. The book grapples
with many complex themes but their discussions of the influence of no-excuses policies and
personal social action are most relevant to the findings from this dissertation study. As it relates
to no-excuses models, the authors grapple with its relationship to students’ agency. Previous

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scholars have argued that no-excuses approaches negatively impact students’ abilities to assert
their opinions and advocate for themselves and leave them more likely to defer to authority
(Golann & Torres, 2018; Graham, 2020). Such behaviors often require assimilating to the norms
associated with Whiteness and subordination under White supremacist ideologies and institutions
(Bonilla-Silva, 2012; Urrieta, 2010).
In thinking about the participants who graduated from CPHS, Watts and Hipolito-
Delgado (2015) explore the concept of personal social action. In comparison to collective social
action which requires solidarity with a group working towards change, personal social action
describes how an individual challenges injustice and perhaps best describes the socialization of
CPHS alumni. Personal social action has two main features: (1) pushing back against stereotypes
and (2) the actions of a single individual (Seider & Graves, 2020; Watts and Hipolito-Delgado,
2015). As witnessed through the findings, CPHS participants spoke about their college
aspirations of earning a degree as opposing dominant narratives of stereotypes in the media about
Latinx and urban communities, particularly residents from certain parts of Los Angeles. When
responding to the hypothetical scenarios, participants spoke about ignoring bias incidents as a
means of coping. Seider and Graves (2020) and I have a shared perspective that no-excuses
models inform their students of the tools needed for navigating dominant, largely “Whitestream”
(Urrieta, 2010) settings.
Seider and Graves (2020) establish a delineation of navigational approaches as either
conventional or critical. An entire school and their students by extension are not necessarily
abiding by one or the other, but given their approach to the academic curriculum, college
readiness, and discipline, CPHS and their graduates seem most aligned with conventional
navigation practices. One understands the importance of preparing minoritized students with

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conventional navigational capacities given the consequences and dangers they face, such as
when participants mention being worried about losing their spot at their university if
reprimanded for responding to a racist incident. At the same time, critical navigational abilities
are important for creating social change in high school and college environments towards social
justice and more equitable educational systems.
Love (2019) asserts the importance of creating educational spaces where minoritized
students can not only survive, as one might argue is the goal of conventional navigation, but
work towards creating equity-oriented spaces where these students can thrive. There are potential
spots of critical consciousness development where CPHS students have an opportunity to learn
critical navigation, such as this most recent year when the alumni advisor brought in an
organization to the college readiness class to speak about identity. Participants referenced this as
having taught them the importance of knowing yourself as you transition to college. In college,
cultural orientation programs, cultural clubs, and ethnic and gender studies courses are other
areas that fostered more critical understanding among participants. These areas are important for
educators, practitioners, and researchers to explore and raise up the multiple ways such
initiatives, programs, and departments support students. We must also find ways to integrate the
key concepts of critical consciousness such as social analysis, political agency, and social action
(Freire, 1973, 2005; Godfrey et al., 2019; Seider & Graves, 2020) into structures, like college
and career readiness across high schools as well as institution-wide programming in universities.
Such efforts have the potential to create more justice-oriented student leaders and by extension,
more just educational systems.
Research has established a clear connection between critical consciousness development
for minoritized youth and other positive outcomes, such as political engagement (Diemer & Li,

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2011), academic achievement (Cabrera et al., 2014), and professional aspirations (Diemer &
Blustein, 2006; Diemer et al., 2010). As the work of Freire (1973, 2005) and the most recent
research conducted by Seider and Graves (2020) shows, critical consciousness is necessary to
support minoritized students with combating oppression. Per neoliberalism, if the purpose of
secondary education is simply to attend college, and the purpose of college is to acquire a job,
critical consciousness may not be seen as the main priority.
Merely a stamp on a mission statement to some, many still believe that both secondary
and postsecondary education have broader goals of creating civically engaged citizenry prepared
to work towards equity and justice. Not only is it important that students learn about these topics,
but they must also engage in the learning process together. Beyond the confines of educational
spaces, Benner and Pastor (2012; 2015) emphasize the importance of epistemic communities
where both what you know and who you know it with, matter. Their research describes the value
of diverse and dynamic epistemic communities, in particular, as those that are,
diverse in their membership and sources of knowledge, and dynamic in their ability to
withstand shocks, continuously learn, and adjust over time—can actually help construct
and sustain regional social norms that facilitate the achievement of growth, resilience,
and inclusion (p. 3)

To achieve such communities, the public deserves schools, charter or otherwise, that foster
collective knowledge development through understanding and creation.
Implications
As explored directly through the voices of the student participants in this dissertation
study, neoliberal meritocracy has both material and sociocultural implications for students, high
schools, and the higher education institutions they ultimately transition to following earning their
diploma. Additionally, future research must contend with not only continuing to explore the

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consequences of the socializing influence of neoliberal meritocracy on education but also use
more involved methodological approaches that actively push back against these cultural shifts.
Implications for Students
Throughout my interviews with students and analyses of our discussions, the findings
illuminated the intricate relationship among how participants came to understand themselves,
their families, and their cultures in important ways. When reflecting upon their identities,
students’ personal, familial, and educational experiences all mattered for their confidence
development and the coping mechanisms that appealed to them when managing challenging
situations. Often, participants’ relationships with their cultural identities were based on the extent
to which their parents made cultural traditions and practices a part of their upbringing.
Additionally, CPHS alumni spoke about how the environment at their high school, and later their
college, also helped inform their sense of self generally and their cultural identity in particular.
Students varied in their abilities to use critical lenses for understanding their experiences.
Like most people, they tended to view inequality from an individual and interpersonal
perspective as is emphasized by popular media and dominant narratives. Yet, there were a few
students who had developed a more critical perspective in their capacity to see inequality from a
broader, systemic lens. There are a few examples of opportunities that supported students to
develop more critical ways of seeing the world. During their high school experience, the identity
presentation conducted by a local organization in the college readiness class helped. And during
their university experiences, cultural events, clubs, and academic departments helped facilitate
more critical perspectives. Armed with such perspectives, minoritized students are more likely to
view injustice as a systemic concern and a collective responsibility to address rather than a
personal problem or something to be ignored (Seider & Graves, 2020).

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There are youth activists and community-based organizations that are using critical lenses
to prepare youth to take on challenges in collective ways. Locally, the southern California
College Access Network (SoCal CAN) is an organization that unites a network of stakeholders
committed to supporting college access and success for low-income students. Recently, they
started the SoCal CAN Changemakers fellowship for students in southern California with the
goal of helping students learn about issues of inequality in higher education. Fellows develop the
skills needed to advocate for social justice and pursue collective actions that can facilitate
institutional change. In a recent campaign for example, SoCal CAN Changemakers created a list
of COVID-19 related concerns that they and their peers were experiencing on college campuses
in the region. Rather than stop there, fellows wrote to their campus administrators advocating for
initiatives and policies that helped address their stated concerns. By learning, skill-building, and
engaging in advocacy together, these fellows are examples of how minoritized students are
pushing back against neoliberal influences. Opportunities that empower youth to collectively
understand themselves, their complex identities, and how they connect to broader systems of
inequality are needed to combat neoliberal and presumptive meritocratic structures.
Implications for High Schools
Though high schools provide students with an array of academic and social skills, much
of the public discussions about secondary schools are focused on the extent to which they
prepare their graduates for college. For this reason, concepts related to “college readiness” are
common and often strong determinants of a high school’s success. As mentioned, a commitment
to this idea of college readiness has bolstered the popularity of urban charter schools that pride
themselves on providing preparation for college. Thus far, college readiness has referred to (1)
test preparation for college entrance exams, like the SAT and the ACT, (2) college support

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structures, such as college counselors and college readiness courses, and (3) school cultures that
help students develop college knowledge, such as the use of college terminology like “office
hours” and college pendants, in addition to information that occupy school bulletin boards.
For minoritized students, especially those who will be the first in their families to pursue
higher education, these college readiness efforts are important. Yet, as this dissertation makes
clear, there are many aspects of the college transition process that current college readiness
approaches and curricula fail to address. CPHS graduates spoke about the culture shock they
experienced as they transitioned from high school to their respective college campuses. Some of
their anecdotes spoke to differences in race, ethnicity, class, and gender- and many spoke to how
intersections of these identity elements fostered feelings of isolation or feelings of community.
For one student who ultimately left his UC campus, culture shock was also tied to mental health
challenges that made him question his abilities and his belonging to campus.
Moving forward, college readiness must address these concerns. Especially at urban
charter schools that tend to serve majority racially and economically minoritized students,
college readiness curricula that do not discuss the highly racialized, gendered, and class-based
dynamics that are exacerbated on historically White campuses are inadequate. Yet, one cannot
assume that schools leaders, administrators, and teachers are prepared to facilitate school cultures
with an equity-minded approach to college readiness. Undergraduate education departments,
teacher preparation programs, and practitioner professional development initiatives need to
provide equity-minded approaches that are grounded in critical theories and offer hands-on
applied training with experienced equity coaches who have a proven understanding and
commitment to social justice broadly and racial justice explicitly.

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College readiness courses and workshops of the future must discuss the structural nature
of racism, classism, sexism, and ableism as just a few of the often unnoticed influences on higher
education policies, programs, and practices. Additionally, such initiatives should provide
students, especially minoritized students, with examples of bias incidents (e.g.,
microaggressions, hate crimes) that continue to happen across educational spaces while allowing
students to practice how they might respond through collective action that holds these
institutions accountable. These efforts must detail successful organizing traditions of the past that
show the importance of their communities, resources that they have available to them, and the
structures charged with doing this work that students must hold accountable. To combat against
perpetuating neoliberal assumptions that such events are isolated and are about individual bias,
these curricula must also educate students about the history of exclusion that the U.S. higher
education system was founded upon to exemplify the structural ways that it perpetuates
inequality.
Implications for Higher Education
Another consequence of the neoliberal era and its influence on education is declining
support for the idea that higher education is a public good. Additionally, there are growing
expectations that the ultimate purpose of a college degree is that it connects and prepares an
individual for a career that leads to opportunity, especially financial independence, and success.
It would be unfair not to acknowledge that the rising costs of higher education and declining
public financial support make job prospects upon college graduation even more precarious.
These underlying trends emphasize statistical metrics related to persistence, completion, and
most recently- the percentage of college graduates who are in graduate school or employment
within six months of earning their degree. While important, higher education continues to ignore

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the value of providing a transformative education- where students can learn about themselves,
their communities, and through structural analysis, how collective action can bring about social
justice and liberation (Garcia, 2020).
Postsecondary movements during the Civil Rights Era have catalyzed the establishment
of identity-based centers and student organizations as well as required diversity courses and
ethnic studies departments (Garcia, 2020; Lozano, 2010; Patton, 2006). While these sites and
initiatives indicate and continue to push for progress, they also tend to be marginalized in terms
of their limited institutional power and position at the peripheries, both physically and
figuratively (Hypolite, 2019). In today’s neoliberal higher education system, colleges and
universities state their missions and goals as relating to preparing diverse students for the 21st
century workplace, often using buzzwords and progressive language to communicate such
sentiments (Hypolite & Stewart, 2019). Yet, when faced with moral dilemmas, such as
restrictions on travel for international students, the potential for ICE raids on college campuses to
intimidate undocumented students, decisions about student, staff, and faculty safety amidst the
COVID-19 pandemic, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, university leadership struggle and
often fail to act (Hypolite & Stewart, 2019; Kolodner, 2020; McKenzie, 2020).
When imagining a transformative approach to leadership and practice in higher
education, it requires infusing elements such as social justice curricula and community
partnerships to facilitate material, equity-minded change (Bensimon, 2018; Center for Urban
Education; Hurtado, 2015). Though an institution-wide, transformative identity may be
aspirational currently, programs, departments, and centers are taking more collectivist and
engaged approaches to educate themselves and college students. Rather than abide by a top-
down or bottom-up strategy, transformational shifts require all of the above- including student,

161

administrator, and faculty activism (Gorski, 2019; Hope et al., 2016; Jones & Squire, 2019) as
well as transformative leadership (Chang, 2002; Shields, 2010).
In considering what more just and equitable efforts in higher education look like, a
commitment to on-going learning is a necessary first step. In using the movement for racial
justice that has been ongoing, but especially reawakened with the recent murders of people like
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, campuses are finally open to engaging with concepts such as
anti-racism broadly and anti-Blackness in particular (Dancy et al., 2018; Kendi, 2019). Ongoing
professional development related to racial justice requires: (1) personal and community
education, (2) analysis and reflection on institutional racial equity gaps, and (3) a commitment to
action.
In the fight for racial justice, faculty, staff, and students are engaging in reading groups as
well as survey, interview, and focus group administration to advance understanding of racial
injustice on individual and community-wide levels. Racially minoritized students have also been
sharing their racialized college experiences on social media, such as the popular Instagram
hashtag: #Blackat[institution]. Unfortunately, there are many theme across colleges and
universities in terms of their minoritized students’ experiences and much of it is not new to
communities of color. Therefore, higher education must grapple directly with their institutional
data to determine specific gaps in racial equity (Center for Urban Education, 2019). Finally,
students are demanding that colleges and universities take action. One’s ability to talk about a
problem is not enough. As suggested by a lead research center committed to racial equity, the
Center for Urban Education (2019), institutional leaders must identify the goals, detail the
strategies, and provide the tools needed to mobilize stakeholders in their efforts towards racial
equity.

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Opportunities for Future Research
Zimmer et al., (2009) urged future research about charter schools to “move beyond test
scores and broaden the scope of measures and questions examined” (p. xix). This dissertation
study contributes to current research by offering an analysis of data beyond test score
comparisons by utilizing the insights discerned from student voice. Additionally, much of the
charter school literature has focused on K-12 systems, policies, and experiences. This study
seeks to provide an understanding of how Latinx graduates of an urban charter school reflect
upon their time in high school and the ways in which it prepared them to varying degrees for
demographically different university environments.
Critical scholars have explored the myriad of ways in which charter schools are a
neoliberal tool allowing for private interests to gain further power within public education.
Future studies should contend with the agentic decisions that charter school educators and their
students can make towards equity, despite being a part of a largely oppressive, market-oriented
system. An important and underutilized methodological approach to achieving such a goal
includes employing participatory research methods. Both critical practitioner and youth
participatory action research methods (Fine, 2018; Kemmis et al., 2013) have the power to
collaborate with educators and students to learn about the precarious positionality of urban
charter schools in the context of educational justice. Researchers can work with participants to
develop the skills to create change in their school and local communities. Efforts to push back
against neoliberalism can potentially foster partnerships between charters and traditional public
schools to share knowledge, best practices, and resources in a collective nature.
Conclusion

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Neoliberalism has influenced systems across society for decades. Therefore, seeing the
world through the lens of neoliberal meritocracy -whereby injustice is permanent and minoritized
students grapple with, cope with, and navigate this reality by continuing to work harder than
their peers- is not exclusive to graduates of urban charter schools. Yet, participants are, in a way,
the metaphorical canaries in the coal mine. Charter schools are built upon neoliberal ideals of
individual choice and meritocratic notions of hard work. For these reasons, many of their mottos
purport that their students can achieve no matter what zip code they come from. While one
would hope that schools can truly change students’ trajectories despite systemic injustice in
education, housing, employment, etc., such claims ignore these factors. This approach leaves
students to believe that while inequality exists, they must work much harder than others from
more privileged positions to overcome society's problems. In essence, charter schools and
perhaps many other schools today, are limiting college preparation to simply navigate injustice
rather than become leaders who can change unequal systems.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, high school and college students across the nation
faced an abrupt end to their senior years. Like many other previously planned moments of
celebration, social distancing halted large gatherings- including graduation ceremonies. In an
attempt to offer an opportunity for a virtual acknowledgement of their momentous
accomplishments, celebrities from music, sports, and activist movements joined together. One
highly anticipated guest included former President Barack Obama. While his administration has
been accused of abiding by and even advancing, neoliberal agendas, Obama (2020) offered the
following words of wisdom to high school and college seniors in the Class of 2020:
[The pandemic has] woken a lot of young people to the fact that the old ways of doing
things just don't work; that it doesn't matter how much money you make if everyone
around you is hungry and sick; and that our society and our democracy only work when
we think not just about ourselves, but about each other.

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His words seem to counter the mainstream notion that earning a high school diploma or a college
degree are simply individual feats. He speaks to the collective need for a healthy and democratic
society that values collective benefit over individual wealth. In his finals words of advice,
Obama offers the following:
And finally, build a community. No one does big things by themselves. Right now, when
people are scared, it's easy to be cynical and say let me just look out for myself, or my
family, or people who look or think or pray like me. But if we're going to get through
these difficult times; if we're going to create a world where everybody has the
opportunity to find a job and afford college; if we're going to save the environment and
defeat future pandemics, then we're going to have to do it together. So be alive to one
another's struggles. Stand up for one another's rights. Leave behind all the old ways of
thinking that divide us -- sexism, racial prejudice, status, greed -- and set the world on a
different path.

Here, Obama encourages graduates to think beyond themselves by aligning themselves with the
struggles of others. While his wisdom offers hope for a path forward, as was the theme of his
presidential campaigns, Obama falls into a similar tendency as the urban charter school and its
graduates in this study- an acknowledgment and understanding of inequality, but little attention
to how problems of sexual, racial, and class-based injustice are systemic. K12 school systems
and higher education institutions cannot continue to present the problems of the U.S. nation and
the global world as isolated events of inequality. They must stop asserting that the only action
one can take to improve society, especially for minoritized students, is through individual and
traditional versions of success via degree attainment, professional careers, and wealth
accumulation. A truly transformative education helps young people to learn about themselves
and their communities, understand the structural nature of inequality, and advocate for collective
action towards social justice locally, nationally, and globally.

165

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Appendix A: IRB Approval Form

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Appendix B: Informed Consent Form
University of Southern California - Rossier School of Education
INFORMATION/FACTS SHEET FOR EXEMPT NON-MEDICAL RESEARCH

You are invited to participate in a research study conducted by Liane Hypolite at the University
of Southern California because you are a graduate from [CPHS]. You must be aged 18 and up to
participate. This research study includes only people who voluntarily choose to participate. This
document explains information about this study. You should ask questions about anything that is
unclear to you.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
The goal of this project is to examine the influence of [CPHS] on their graduates’ college-going
patterns, college experiences, college perceptions, and college persistence.
PARTICIPANT INVOLVEMENT
If you agree to take part in this study, you will be asked to participate in either a focus group or
individual interview, which will take approximately 45 minutes. You do not have to answer any
questions you do not want to or feel uncomfortable answering.
ALTERNATIVES TO PARTICIPATION
Your alternative is to not participate. Your relationship with [CPHS] or your current institution
of higher education will not be affected whether or not you participate in this study.
CONFIDENTIALITY
There will be no identifiable information obtained in connection with this study. Your name,
address or other identifiable information will not be connected to your interview responses.
Results of the data will be shared with [CPHS] and other USC related constituents. Reports will
be in anonymous/aggregate form such that no individual respondents can be identified.
The data will be stored on a password-protected computer in the researcher’s possession for four
years after the study has been completed and then destroyed.
The members of the research team and the University of Southern California’s Human Subjects
Protection Program (HSPP) may access the data. The HSPP reviews and monitors research
studies to protect the rights and welfare of research subjects.
INVESTIGATOR CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions or concerns about the research, please feel free to contact the Principal
Investigator, Liane Hypolite, via email at lhypolit@usc.edu
IRB CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have questions, concerns, or complaints about your rights as a research participant or the
research in general and are unable to contact the research team, or if you want to talk to someone
independent of the research team, please contact the University of Southern California
Institutional Review Board, 1640 Marengo Street, Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90033-9269.
Phone (323) 442-0114 or email irb@usc.edu.

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Appendix C: Participant Demographic Form

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201

202

203

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Appendix D: Recruitment E-Mail
Hey [student name],
I hope you are enjoying your summer. My name is Liane and I am doing a study for my
dissertation on how [CPHS] alumni transition to college, particularly those attending UCI,
UCLA, and UCR. I hope you will consider helping me out!
Here are the next steps:
- Complete this 2-minute survey; it will give me some important background info about you
- Then I will email/text you to schedule a 1-hour interview; we can meet wherever is most
convenient for you
- You will then receive a $10 Amazon gift card as a token of my appreciation for your time
I would REALLY appreciate your participation and look forward to connecting, Liane

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Appendix E: Interview Protocol - Phase 1
Interview Protocol #1
Class of 2019, Summer 2019
Phase 1

Thank you for agreeing to participate in this study. My overall goal is to understand your
transition to college and your experiences during your first year. I would also like to understand
your overall high school experience, including any similarities and differences you notice
between your high school experiences and your college experiences. There are several topics that
I would like to discuss with you today. We will discuss your background and earlier school
experiences, the college application and selection process, as well as your own thoughts about
who you are today and a few predictions about your future college experiences. The interview
will last between 45-60 minutes. At any point in time during the interview, you can choose to
stop or ask to skip a question.

Please select a pseudonym based on one of your personal idols (ideally a well-known/famous
person you admire). If you cannot think of one, any pseudonym will do!

Do you have any questions before we begin?
Do I have your permission to begin the recording?

Background and Early Experiences
* Tell me about your background.
● Where did you grow up? Describe the demographics of the neighborhood in which you
were raised, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc. What is your current
neighborhood like? Are the characteristics similar or different? How so?
● Describe your family. Who do you currently live with? What do they do for work? Where
were they born?
● What were your elementary and middle schools like? What kinds of students attended
them? Describe the demographics.
● What were your favorite and least favorite subjects? Why?

High School Experience and College Process
* Tell me about your high school experience.
High School
● How did you/your family first hear about [CPHS]? When did you start attending
[CPHS]? Did you attend [CPHS] for all four years?
● What was your high school like…
○ Academically?

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■ What were the expectations of students and teachers (either by the school
or for yourself)?
■ How challenging were the academics?
■ What do you think about the hybrid technology approach?
○ Socially?
■ What clubs, activities, community service, did you participate in?
■ What was/were your friend group(s) like? How would you say they
impacted your school experience?
Overall Perceptions of High School
● What was your favorite/least favorite part about attending your high school?
○ What is one thing you believe your high school should continue to do?
○ What is one thing you believe your high school should change?
● What did you learn about yourself, if anything, throughout your high school experience?
● What does [CPHS’ motto] mean to you, if anything?
● Based on your high school experience, how prepared do you feel for college?
● How do you think [CPHS] compares to students’ high school experiences at private,
public, and other charter schools?
● If you could go back in time, would you have still decided to attend [CPHS]?
College Application Process
● Why do you want to go to college?
● When and how did you decide that you wanted to go to college?
● Who (if anyone) guided that decision?
● How did you learn about different colleges?
● What did you do to apply to college?
● Who helped you apply to college?
College Selection
● Which colleges did you apply to?
● How did you ultimately choose the college you are attending in the fall?
● Have you already visited your college?
○ If yes, what was/were your experience(s) and first impressions? Especially
racialized perceptions.
○ If no, why not?
Self
* Tell me about who you are today.
● What are three words that best describe you and why?
● How do you identify in terms of your race, ethnicity, and gender?
● What does your racial, ethnic, and gender identity mean to you now?
○ Has that changed at all since you were younger? If so, how?
● What did your racial, ethnic, and gender identity mean to you in high school, if anything?

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● Did you have any experiences in high school when you race, ethnicity, or gender felt
especially important?
● Has race/ethnicity/gender been a factor in your friend groups? (how you chose them, who
you remained friends with, etc.)
● Did topics related to race, ethnicity, and gender ever come up in school or with your
friends?
Future College Predictions
* Tell me about your predictions for college.
● Do you feel prepared for college academically? Why or why not?
○ What types of classes do you want to take?
○ What might you major in?
● Do you feel prepared for college socially? Why or why not?
○ What types of student organizations might you join?
● Do you feel prepared for college financially?
○ What is your plan for paying for college?
○ What types of student jobs might you be interested in?
● What makes you most excited about college?
● What makes you most nervous about college?
● Hypothetical Scenarios
○ Scenario #1: You walk into your intro class for your major and realize as you
enter the lecture hall that you are the only X (their self-identification) in the
room?
■ How might you feel? What would you do?
○ Scenario #2: The following incident happened on your college campus.
■ UCI: You attend a party at a frat house and see a person wearing blackface and
another person dressed in a sombrero and poncho, which is supposed to be a
“Mexican” costume.
● https://www.facebook.com/notes/patrick-chen/anti-blackness-at-uc-
irvine-possible-trigger-warning/10151408843695922/ (2013)
■ UCLA: Some students write racial slurs on your door.
● http://dailybruin.com/2012/02/28/westwood_apartment_vandalized_with
_antimexican_sexist_graffiti/ (2013)
■ UCR: A department that is focused on studying the histories and current contexts
for people of color, like Ethnic Studies, is vandalized.
● https://www.pe.com/2016/04/06/uc-riverside-investigation-of-anti-
muslim-vandalism-ongoing/ (2016)
■ How might you feel? What would you do?
● Is there anything you have not shared related to you, your identity, [CPHS], charter
schools, or college that you would like to share?

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Appendix F: Interview Protocol - Phase 2A (UC enrolled)
Interview Protocol #2
ALL [CPHS] Alumni, Fall 2019
Phase 2A

Thank you for agreeing to participate in this study. My overall goal is to understand your
transition to college and your experiences since graduating from [CPHS]. I would also like to
understand your overall high school experience, including any similarities and differences you
notice between your high school and your college environments. There are several topics that I
would like to discuss with you today. We will discuss your background and K-12 school
experiences, the college application and selection process, your own thoughts about who you are
today, and your college environment. The interview will last between 45-60 minutes. At any
point in time during the interview, you can choose to stop or ask to skip a question.

Please select a pseudonym based on one of your personal idols (ideally a well-known/famous
person you admire). If you cannot think of one, any pseudonym will do!

Do you have any questions before we begin?
Do I have your permission to begin the recording?

Background and Early Education Experiences
* Tell me about your background.
● Where did you grow up? What is your neighborhood like? Describe the demographics of
the neighborhood in which you were raised, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic
status, etc.
● Describe your family. Who did you grow up living with? What do they do for work?
Where were they born?
● What were your elementary and middle schools like? What kinds of students attended
them? Describe the demographics, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.

High School Experience and College Process
* Tell me about your high school experience.
High School
● How did you/your family first hear about [CPHS]? When did you start attending
[CPHS]? Did you attend [CPHS] for all four years?
● What was your high school like…
○ Academically?
■ What were the expectations of students and teachers (either by the school
or for yourself)?

209

■ How challenging were the academics?
■ What do you think about the hybrid technology approach?
○ Socially?
■ What clubs, activities, community service, did you participate in?
■ What were your friend group(s) like?
■ What do you think about the discipline system?
College Application Process
● Why did you want to go to college?
○ Who (if anyone) guided that decision?
● What was your process for applying to college?
○ How did you learn about different colleges?
○ Who helped you apply to college?
○ What was your personal statement/college essay about?
● How did you ultimately choose the college you are attending after graduating from
[CPHS]?
○ Was campus demographics a factor?
Overall Perceptions of High School
● What was your favorite/least favorite part about attending your high school?
● What does [CPHS’ motto] mean to you, if anything?
● Based on your high school experience, how prepared were you for college?
● How do you think [CPHS] compares to students’ high school experiences at private,
public, and other charter schools?
● If you could go back in time, would you have still decided to attend [CPHS]?
Self
* Tell me about who you are today.
● What are three words that best describe you and why?
● How do you identify in terms of your race, ethnicity, and gender?
● What does your racial/ethnic identity and culture mean to you now?
○ Has that changed at all since you were younger (childhood? high school?
college?)? If so, how?
○ Did you have any race, ethnicity, or gender-related experiences in high school that
stand out to you?
● Do conversations about race, ethnicity, or gender come up in your family?
○ If so, what are they typically about?
Preparation & College Experiences
* Tell me about your preparation for and experiences in college.
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for college academically? Why or why not?
○ What types of classes have you taken?
○ Have you used academic resources (office hours, tutoring, library, etc.)?
○ Have you ever been on academic probation?

210

■ If so, what happened?
○ Do your classes explore topics related to race, ethnicity or gender? If so, what
have you learned about these topics?
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for your future career? Why or why not?
○ What is your major?
■ How did you choose it?
○ What kinds of jobs or internships have you had as a college student?
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for college socially? Why or why not?
○ What types of student organizations have you been a part of?
■ Why did you choose these organizations?
○ Who are your friend groups in college?
■ Has race/ethnicity been a factor in your friend groups (how you chose
them, who you stay friends with, etc.)?
○ Do topics related to race/ethnicity ever come up with your friends?
○ Do students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds seem to get along well on
campus?
● Do you feel like you belong on your campus? Why or why not?
● Have you had any race, ethnicity, or gender-related experiences in college that stand out
to you?
● Has there been any race, ethnicity, or gender-related issues or incidents on your campus
since you have been a student?
○ If so, what did you think about it? What was your involvement, if any?
● Is there anything that [CPHS] could have done to better prepare you for college?
○ In particular, preparation related to the racial/ethnic/gender dynamics of college?
● Is there anything you have not shared related to you, your identity, [CPHS], charter
schools, or your college experience that you would like to share?

211

Appendix G: Interview Protocol - Phase 2B (non-UC enrolled)
Interview Protocol #3
Non-UC [CPHS] Alumni, Fall 2019
Phase 2B

Thank you for agreeing to participate in this study. My overall goal is to understand your
transition to college and your experiences since graduating from [CPHS]. I would also like to
understand your overall high school experience, including any similarities and differences you
notice between your high school and your college environments. There are several topics that I
would like to discuss with you today. We will discuss your background and K-12 school
experiences, the college application and selection process, your own thoughts about who you are
today, and your college environment. The interview will last between 45-60 minutes. At any
point in time during the interview, you can choose to stop or ask to skip a question.

Please select a pseudonym based on one of your personal idols (ideally a well-known/famous
person you admire). If you cannot think of one, any pseudonym will do!

Do you have any questions before we begin?
Do I have your permission to begin the recording?

Background and Early Education Experiences
* Tell me about your background.
● Where did you grow up? What is your neighborhood like? Describe the demographics of
the neighborhood in which you were raised, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic
status, etc.
● Describe your family. Who did you grow up living with? What do they do for work?
Where were they born?
● What were your elementary and middle schools like? What kinds of students attended
them? Describe the demographics, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.

High School Experience and College Process
* Tell me about your high school experience.
High School
● How did you/your family first hear about [CPHS]? When did you start attending
[CPHS]? Did you attend [CPHS] for all four years?
● What was your high school like…
○ Academically?
■ What were the expectations of students and teachers (either by the school
or for yourself)?

212

■ How challenging were the academics?
■ What do you think about the hybrid technology approach?
○ Socially?
■ What clubs, activities, community service, did you participate in?
■ What were your friend group(s) like?
■ What do you think about the discipline system?
College Application Process
● Why did you want to go to college?
○ Who (if anyone) guided that decision?
● What was your process for applying to college?
○ How did you learn about different colleges?
○ Who helped you apply to college?
○ What was your personal statement/college essay about?
● How did you ultimately choose the college you attended after graduating from [CPHS]?
○ Was campus demographics a factor?
Overall Perceptions of High School
● What was your favorite/least favorite part about attending your high school?
● What does [CPHS’ motto] mean to you, if anything?
● Based on your high school experience, how prepared were you for college?
● How do you think [CPHS] compares to students’ high school experiences at private,
public, and other charter schools?
● If you could go back in time, would you have still decided to attend [CPHS]?
Self
* Tell me about who you are today.
● What are three words that best describe you and why?
● How do you identify in terms of your race, ethnicity, and gender?
● What does your racial/ethnic identity and culture mean to you now?
○ Has that changed at all since you were younger (childhood? high school?
college?)? If so, how?
○ Did you have any race, ethnicity, or gender-related experiences in high school that
stand out to you?
● Do conversations about race, ethnicity, or gender come up in your family?
○ If so, what are they typically about?
Preparation & College Experiences
* Tell me about your preparation for and experiences in college.
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for college academically? Why or why not?
○ What has been your educational path since graduating from [CPHS]?
■ How long did you attend your UC institution?
■ Why did you leave your UC institution?
○ What types of classes have you taken?

213

○ Have you used academic resources (office hours, tutoring, library, etc.)?
○ Have you ever been on academic probation?
■ If so, what happened?
○ Do your classes explore topics related to race, ethnicity or gender? If so, what
have you learned about these topics?
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for your future career? Why or why not?
○ What is your major?
■ How did you choose it?
○ What kinds of jobs or internships have you had as a college student?
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for college socially? Why or why not?
○ What types of student organizations have you been a part of?
■ Why did you choose these organizations?
○ Who are your friend groups in college?
■ Has race/ethnicity been a factor in your friend groups (how you chose
them, who you stay friends with, etc.)?
○ Do topics related to race/ethnicity ever come up with your friends?
○ Do students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds seem to get along well on
campus?
● Do you feel like you belong on your campus? Why or why not?
● Have you had any race, ethnicity, or gender-related experiences in college that stand out
to you?
● Has there been any race, ethnicity, or gender-related issues or incidents on your campus
since you have been a student?
○ If so, what did you think about it? What was your involvement, if any?
● Is there anything that [CPHS] could have done to better prepare you for college?
○ In particular, preparation related to the racial/ethnic/gender dynamics of college?
● Is there anything you have not shared related to you, your identity, [CPHS], charter
schools, or your college experience that you would like to share?

214

Appendix H: Interview Protocol - Phase 3
Interview Protocol #4
Class of 2019 [CPHS] Alumni, Follow Up
Phase 3

Thank you for agreeing to continue to participate in this study. As you know, my overall goal is
to understand your transition to college and your experiences since graduating from [CPHS]. We
have discussed your overall high school experience, but now I want to explore any similarities
and differences you notice between your high school and your college environments. There are
several topics that I would like to discuss with you today. We will discuss your current thoughts
on your college preparation based on your early college experience, especially attending [CPHS],
your own updated thoughts about who you are today, and your college environment. The
interview will last between 45-60 minutes. At any point in time during the interview, you can
choose to stop or ask to skip a question. Some of these questions may feel repetitive based on our
first interview, but that is because I want to get a sense of if your opinions have changed since
attending college.

Do you have any questions before we begin?
Do I have your permission to begin the recording?

High School Experience and College Process
* Tell me about your high school experience.
High School Preparation
● Based on your high school experience, how prepared were you for college?
○ Thinking back to [CPHS]’ academics (content), do you believe it helped prepare
you for college?
○ Thinking back to [CPHS]’ hybrid, online, module approach, do you believe it
helped prepare you for college?
○ Thinking back to [CPHS]’ discipline system, do you believe it helped prepare you
for college?
● How do you think [CPHS] compares to students’ high school experiences at private,
public, and other charter schools based on people you have met in college?
● If you could go back in time, would you have still decided to attend [CPHS]?
Self
* Tell me about who you are today.
● What are three words that best describe you and why?
● How do you identify in terms of your race, ethnicity, and gender?
● What does your racial/ethnic identity and culture mean to you now?

215

○ Has that changed at all since you were younger (childhood? high school?
college?)? If so, how?
● Do conversations about race, ethnicity, or gender come up in your family?
○ If so, what are they typically about?
● How has your family dealt with your transition to college? How have you dealt with
being away from home?
Preparation & College Experiences
* Tell me about your preparation for and experiences in college.
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for college academically? Why or why not?
○ What types of classes have you taken?
■ Were your professors racially/ethnically diverse?
○ Have you used academic resources (office hours, tutoring, library, etc.)?
○ Have you ever been on academic probation?
■ If so, what happened?
○ Do your classes explore topics related to race, ethnicity or gender?
■ If so, what have you learned about these topics?
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for your future career? Why or why not?
○ What is your major?
■ How did you choose it?
○ What kinds of jobs or internships have you had as a college student?
● Did [CPHS] prepare you for college socially? Why or why not?
○ What types of student organizations have you been a part of?
■ Why did you choose these organizations?
○ Who are your friend groups in college?
■ Has race/ethnicity been a factor in your friend groups (how you chose
them, who you stay friends with, etc.)?
○ Do topics related to race/ethnicity/gender ever come up with your friends?
○ Do students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds seem to get along well on
campus?
● Do you feel like you belong on your campus? Why or why not?
● Have you had any race, ethnicity, or gender-related experiences in college that stand out
to you?
● Last time we met, I described two scenarios for you and asked how might you respond.
○ Have you been in a situation where you were the only person of your identity in
the classroom?
○ Has there been any race, ethnicity, or gender-related issues or incidents on your
campus since you have been a student?
■ If so, what did you think about it? What was your involvement, if any?
● Is there anything that [CPHS] could have done to better prepare you for college?
○ In particular, preparation related to the racial/ethnic/gender dynamics of college?

216

● Is there anything you have not shared related to you, your identity, [CPHS], charter
schools, or your college experience that you would like to share?

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Urban charter schools that serve mostly low-income, first-generation, and racially minoritized students have implemented college-going school cultures where the guiding ideology extends beyond merely graduating from high school or gaining acceptance to college. College completion is the ultimate goal. Though criticized for their rigid disciplinary systems and curricular focus on standardized test preparation, families still look to charter school options for their children as a pathway to college. In California, there are 1,275 charter schools across the state serving 630,000 students, of which over 300,000 identify as Latinx (California Charter Schools Association, 2018). Access to college counseling and college knowledge development help facilitate college-going cultures. ❧ Research has recently started to explore how charter school graduates transition to higher education. This grounded theory study addresses this gap by analyzing 31 interviews with 23 Latinx students who have graduated from an urban charter high school in Los Angeles, College Prep High School (CPHS). This dissertation details how the college transition process unfolds for Latinx graduates of urban charter schools. More specifically, I find that participants’ reflections upon their earlier experiences as well as their collective time spent at CPHS contribute to their alignment with the concept of neoliberal meritocracy—which informs how they understand themselves, their connections to their cultural communities, and ultimately, how they grapple with notions of merit and inequality. Ultimately, these graduates are learning how to navigate historically White institutions (HWIs), but are not prepared for the critical consciousness or skill sets needed to challenge and change systemic inequality on college campuses.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hypolite, Liane Indira (author)

Core Title Navigating the struggle: neoliberal meritocracy, Latinx charter school graduates, and the college transition

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Education Policy

Publication Date 09/19/2020

Defense Date 07/24/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag charter schools,college transition,Latinx students,neoliberalism,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Cole, Darnell (committee chair), Harper, Shaun (committee member), Pastor, Manuel (committee member), Tierney, William (committee member)

Creator Email Liane.Hypolite@usc.edu,LianeHy@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-373883

Unique identifier UC11666265

Identifier etd-HypoliteLi-8983.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-373883 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HypoliteLi-8983.pdf

Dmrecord 373883

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hypolite, Liane Indira

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA