2025 Theses Doctoral

In Transition: A Study of Transitional School Programs

Walker, Dominic Terrel

This dissertation is an investigation of transitional school programs (TSPs), non-profit organizations that recruit students of color from low-income families and prepare them to transition from public middle schools to elite private high schools. Despite being a key part of the pipeline to elite academic institutions, there is limited research about transitional school programs and how they function, or the identity work students engage in while navigating transitional school programs and the subsequent elite private institutions to which they are admitted–identity work that likely conditions their interactions with elite institutions and their futures. Additionally, this dissertation investigates how transitional school programs navigate the conflicting interest of promoting social change while relying on old sources of inequality. Transitional school programs aspire to create a leadership class from the margins, but in what ways may they be legitimizing social inequality as meritocratic?

Using ethnographic methods, from 2019 to 2021 I shadowed a cohort of 17 students at a transitional school program I call “Ascend” in their journey from middle school to high school. I review the historical development of TSPs to argue that these organizations emerged in relation to Black organizing as liberal alternative to radical critiques of white terrorism and domination in the United States. In the case of Ascend, I find that the organization exists within a web of racialized dependencies on elite schools and wealthy financial donors. These dependencies compel Ascend to adopt the inequitable practices and assumptions of the racialized organizational field of elite education. Yet over time, the program begins to resist this organizational order by decoupling their practices from elite schools. Their efforts are reinvigorated by student activism during the Uprisings of 2020 which contribute to destabilizing the racialized organizational order through direct action. As Ascend’s loose coupling to the field became untenable during national student protests, the organization sought to recouple to the demands of student protesters by explicitly renegotiating the terms of inclusion for their students within the racialized organizational field. The case of Ascend shows that decoupling, previously theorized to be a method of evading commitments to equity, may also be a method of subverting racialized dependencies.

Through examining how Ascend students make sense of themselves in relation to other students from their public middle schools and other students in the program. I find that many of the Ascend students I spoke to characterized Ascend as a program not just for smart kids, but for “good people” who want to “change the world,” and their non-TSP peers as people who lack a commitment to contributing positively to society and enriching their own lives. Analyzing the educational histories the students provided in their interviews, I argue that Ascend students’ particular academic careers illustrate preferential treatment in school long before applying to Ascend, and that this contributes to their perceptions of their middle school classmates. Additionally, I find that the students often moralize merit and valorize struggle as a way to prove they are worthy of the academic opportunities Ascend affords. I suggest that Ascend youth, despite a significant amount of time in Ascend classes discussing social inequality, struggle to see how it shapes Ascend and their own lives.