Some of the environmental cues are institutionalized. Though many elementary schools have self-contained classrooms where children of varying performance levels learn together, many middle and secondary schools assign students to different subject levels based on their perceived ability, a practice known as cracking.
This reminds of last class where we talked about the achievement gap and how it should be reframed as an opportunity gap. Oftentimes the lived experiences of race and racism intersect with issues of class and access to education, and these performance evaluations which decide the level of education a student should receive fail to take into account the lived experiences of students, often limiting access to black and brown students. My high school was framed as "academically rigorous" and even though it was public, there was an admission system which was made based on applications and grades from middle school. I always found it wrong that there was an admission system, because I thought that a student's grades and ability to put together an application should not decide whether or not they had access to this academically rigorous education. While my school prided itself on its diversity, this admission system limited access to many students of color who didn't attend a highly-funded middle school where there were opportunities to thrive. This exposes a form of institutionalized racism within the school district.