Sean J. Drake, Ph.D.

Sean J. Drake is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.  Dr. Drake’s research interests include race/ethnicity, school segregation, neighborhood organization and inequality, homeless youth, immigrant incorporation, and ethnographic methods.  He is completing a book manuscript, Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb, which is under contract with University of California Press (expected March 2022).  Academic Apartheid is based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork at two dissimilar high schools in an affluent Southern California suburb.  Drawing on participant and non-participant observation, as well as 122 in-depth interviews with students, parents, teachers, and administrators, Drake unveils hidden institutional mechanisms of between-school segregation that reproduce exceptional academic achievement among Asian and White students while reifying “failure” among Black and Latinx students.  He also examines how institutional definitions of success and failure affect school policies and practices in ways that contribute to school segregation and inequality.  His research has been funded by the Ford Foundation and published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Urban Education, and the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR).  Next fall Professor Drake will join the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Senior Research Associate at the Maxwell Center for Policy Studies.  Dr. Drake holds a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine.