This five-year ethnographic study examines issues of educational opportunity at Russell High, a multiethnic school in the city of Eastown. Focusing on the beliefs and values of students, teachers, and administrators, this study reveals how prevailing cultural beliefs, the collective nature of the student population, and the structure of the school system worked in concert, albeit unintentionally, to foster inequality. To make such an argument, this study draws on American cultural conceptions of individualism and adolescence--exploring how these beliefs were manifested in classrooms, in the...