149 Harvard Educational Review Vol. 80 No. 2 Summer 2010 Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Scholarship Girls Aren’t the Only Chicanas Who Go to College: Former Chicana Continuation High School Students Disrupting the Educational Achievement Binary MARIA C. MALAGON CRYSTAL R. ALVAREZ University of California, Los Angeles Drawing from extensive oral history interviews with five Chicana women, Malagon and Alvarez (re)conceptualize the way educational scholarship defines “high achiev- ing.” As attendees of California continuation high schools, all five women defy soci- etal expectations by moving from these alternative educational spaces to community colleges, then transferring into four-year universities and going on to enroll in grad- uate programs. The article highlights the resistance strategies these young women employ through their critique of social oppression, with the authors using critical race theory, Latina/o critical theory, and Chicana feminist epistemologies to make sense of the women’s narratives and their journeys through the educational pipeline. In his book The Color of Success: Race and High Achieving Youth, Conchas (2006) provides a case study of high-achieving Youth of Color 1 at one high school. The premise is that the majority of educational research focuses on the school- ing failures of students, schools, families, and communities. By contrast, Con- chas’s case study focuses on the networks, motivation, and success of Students of Color. However, without a clear definition of how he uses the term “high achieving,” readers are left to define it in the traditional sense: high test scores, strong grade point averages, and acceptance into a four-year university imme- diately following high school. As a result, the definition of “high achievement” is left unchallenged and can serve to reinforce the ideology of meritocracy