The alienation in music programs I saw at all three schools does not correlate directly with lower test scores, of course, but it reflects a hypercompetitive mentality to which the nearby universities may contribute. An achievement-oriented academic culture inspired by the nearby university is palpable on the high-school campuses—Kevin Hudson, an assistant principal at Pioneer, said some teachers even “teach like they’re at U of M.” Some experts suspect that this university culture both overtly and covertly tends to empower white students while marginalizing their black peers.

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Students of all races described the competitive culture of academic achievement at these high schools as relentless and potentially harmful. The Berkeley High junior Johanna Staples-Ager, who is white and whose father Joel Ager is a UC Berkeley engineering researcher, referred to an academic “junior year death machine” when many of her friends take up to five Advanced Placement classes.

But in such competitive classroom environments, some black students may be particularly vulnerable to the fear that their white peers are judging them by the stereotypes of African American intellectual inferiority, according to Claude Steele, a psychology professor at Berkeley. Steele and his colleagues named this anxiety the “stereotype threat” in the 1990s. Steele’s research suggests that students who achieve at higher levels may be even more susceptible to this fear. “If I am in an elite school … that makes stereotypes about intellectual ability very relevant, I can feel that pressure more intensely,” Steele said.

Reid, a student at Pioneer, said he didn’t experience this stereotype threat in his three AP classes at Pioneer—but Neo Barnes from Berkeley High said he feels highly self-conscious in his Mandarin Chinese class where out of about 20, he is the only black student and slightly more than half are white. “There’s a stereotype that black students can’t learn an advanced language,” he said. Black students at all three high schools spoke repeatedly of being the only student, or one of two or three students, in their AP or upper-level classes. Four percent of Pioneer’s AP students are African American, as are 6 percent of Chapel Hill’s. Meanwhile, 8 percent of the students who graduated from Berkeley High’s prestigious International Baccalaureate in 2016 are African American, according to district officials.

A scarcity of black teaching staff, observers say, can compound black students’ sense of isolation. Less than 5 percent of Berkeley High’s teachers are black; Pioneer’s number is 4 percent, though Principal Tracey Lowder and his support team bring a noticeable African American presence. Chapel Hill has a faculty that is 17 percent black and led by Sulura Jackson, an African American principal. But the support these educators are able to offer during the school day may not be enough to help black students match the skills and experience wealthier white students are more likely acquire from outside academic enrichment, sometimes at the nearby universities. The median income of white families nationally is about 70 percent greater than that of black families: The median white income in Chapel Hill is more than $57,000, for example, while that for African Americans is less than $36,000.