Programs meant to help the disadvantaged must constantly fight creaming pressures.

Evidence

The Upward … Bound program, dedicated to enriching the educational backgrounds of disadvantaged high school students, constantly had to guard against projects taking students whose chances of getting into college were already fairly high. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 789

Categorization

• XREF: An empirical case of mission drift under discretion — useful evidence for the speed at which sorting norms override stated equity goals.