Berkeley High-the only public high school in Berkeley, California-sends many of its students on to top colleges but consigns just as many to failure. Though the school, one of the first in the land to desegregate voluntarily, is highly diverse, a UC Berkeley study concluded that it suffers from "apartheid-like segregation," with white students racing ahead in Advanced Placement courses and poorly prepared black students struggling to keep up in a "sink-or-swim" atmosphere. Learn about the school's desperate attempts to close its exposed achievement gap-which likely went undetected before the era of standards and testing-in "Top-Notch School Fails to Close Achievement Gap," by John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2002.
