We investigate 10th-grade Latinx and African American high school students' engagement in a reform-oriented curriculum designed to foster their critical social analysis of urban schooling. Students' designs of "ideal schools" based on their studies of their neighborhoods largely reproduced existing inequitable structures and practices of schooling. Our study was spurred by the failure of this curriculum and pedagogy to move students to challenge traditional structures of schooling. The grammar of urban schooling, endemic racism, and interest convergence guided our study of students' roles in appropriation of progressive reform and our understanding of the larger constraints within which this effort operated and that limited their critical responses.