The New Civil Rights Movement Fighting Academic Tracking of Black Students
By Tarice L.S. Gray
Tracking in public schools began innocently enough in the 1920s in this country, an era when many high school students took jobs right after graduating and relatively few went to college. Education experts and school officials reasoned it was more practical to establish different curricula, or “tracks” that would prepare students for their likely future. But in the decades since, including those since the Brown decision, tracking too often morphed from scholastic sorting to racial discrimination.