Education has been increasingly lauded as the path to achieving the American Dream, and in this book Martín Sánchez-Jankowski uses extensive ethnographic research to explore the dynamics of the interrelated barriers that low-income students must surpass in order to make transitions successfully from high school to college. With rigor and compassion, and engaging in participant observation to examine how individual students confront the education system, Potholes in the Road shows how obstacles related to issues of structure, culture, and agency make achieving the American Dream through education particularly challenging. “Martín Sánchez-Jankowski has once again produced a top-rate book that will stir much debate in the fields of sociology and urban education studies. Potholes in the Road also offers readers the opportunity to find ways in which public schools can partner with urban communities to contest inequality and racial injustice during the COVID-19 pandemic and also to promote achieving the American Dream.”—Gilberto Q. Conchas, Wayne K. and Anita Woolfolk Hoy Endowed Professor, Pennsylvania State University

“I know of no other book that is as sophisticated as this one at portraying a set of interacting obstacles and challenges that youth from lower-income backgrounds face as they make important transitions between middle and high school and then onto college.”—Lynn Chancer, Executive Officer of the PhD Program in Sociology, The Graduate Center, CUNY