My dissertation reexamines the transfer of students into alternative high schools, separate educational settings for students who have been deemed unsuccessful in mainstream schools. I engaged an exploratory mixed-methods sequential design to present three papers. In the first paper, I leveraged QuantCrit to examine the association between racialized characteristics of mainstream schools and alternative high school transfer. In the second paper, I engaged the unique case of racially-conscious transfer policy reform to explore the racialized features of discretion. In the third paper, I used narrative methods and found that caregivers experienced alternative high school transfer as a form of school pushout. Together, these papers present a new framework of alternative high school transfer that has implications for direct practice and policy reform in districts.