Academic tracking is not just a canker sore in our schools; it’s an educational system of segregation that’s like a “curable” cancer that if left unchecked leads to the demise of vulnerable citizens—our children.
The 21st century public education system’s challenges include closing the academic achievement gaps that persist between the races and classes. School administrators, educators, and policy makers are scrambling all over the nation in an effort to fix the gap problem and raise achievement as federally mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. Academic tracking is an institutionalized practice in U.S. public schools that is at least a century old; dividing students into categories of “more able” or “less able” is used by schools to segregate students into ability groups, instructional levels, and classes. Segregated tracking undermines school reform, yet is often ignored as a primary component of academic achievement—for lack thereof---as the nation focuses on other perceived problems such as teaching to the standardized tests, funding No Child Left Behind, and making Adequate Yearly Progress.
Tracking allocates the most valuable school experiences -- including challenging and meaningful curriculum, engaging instruction, and high teacher expectations -- to students who already have the greatest academic, economic, and social advantages, while students who face the greatest struggles in school and in life receive a more impoverished curriculum based on lower expectation placed on them by school staff.
Anne Wheelock, Children’s Advocate
It’s an important reform matter because the 21st century post-industrialist “white-collar” economy does not need the larger “blue-collar--factory” labor pool of its predecessors. Today’s is a global world requiring highly skilled workers. Tracking disqualifies a huge segment of the population from becoming prepared to take advantage of future opportunities, particularly African Americans, Latinos, children with disabilities and those from low-income or immigrant families.
Is your child academically derailed?
Minority students and those from the lowest socio-economic groups have been found in disproportionate numbers in lower level track courses, and children from upper socioeconomic levels and Whites have been found consistently over represented in higher tracks. This is particularly true in Lower Merion where tracking starts in elementary school, takes shape in middle school, and becomes more formerly labeled in high school as modified, college prep, honors, advanced placement, IB, vocational education, or special education courses.
Segregated Education in Desegregated Schools:
Why We Should Eliminate "Tracking" With "Gifted and Talented" for All
In the 1969 Supreme Court ruling Alexander vs. Holmes County Board of Education, a unanimous court ruled that a Mississippi school district "terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools." The ruling, a mandate for non-compliant segregationists, was supposed to finally reverse the tide of Jim Crow era "separate and unequal" education.
Today, while more students generally attend racially and economically diverse schools, it is no secret that our schools are anything but unitary. According to recent reports by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, concentrations of Blacks and Latinos into resource-deprived schools are at unprecedented levels, reversing years of progress toward integration since the monumental Brown v. Board (1954) and subsequent decisions. But while more recent Supreme Court decisions from Oklahoma City, Louisville, KY and Seattle, WA and policy-level failures such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are rightfully viewed among myriad protagonists of these trends, often overlooked by integration advocates is the reality of "dual school systems" operating at the curricular level, not just at the facility level.
Take for example the case of Southwest Elementary School in Durham, North Carolina. When David Snead began his tenure as principal in 1999, he discovered that 98% of the school's white students and only 7% of black students were identified as "gifted and talented" (G&T), therefore placed in a separate, challenging curriculum. More astonishingly, this was in a school where blacks represented over 70% of the student body, while whites represented only 30%.
Snead, who is white and male, came face to face with one of America's long-embedded institutional-level responses to integration: racialized tracking. And rather than accept internal segregation as an everyday norm, one grounded in the still-prevalent belief that minority students are "cognitively inferior" (or for self-professed non-racists, that they purposely under-perform out of fear of "acting white"), Snead believed otherwise. The principal worked with the school's teachers to alter ways they thought about "giftedness," given that their assessment triggered consideration for subsequent testing into advanced curricula. The results were astounding.
By 2003-2004, 60% of the school's black students were identified as G&T, while 40% of white students were identified as such. Moreover, the impact of the change was evident in the school's performance on state test scores. In 1999-2000, 41% of the school's fifth grade black students did not pass the state reading test compared to 12% for white students, and 23% of
WHEN ERIC WITHERSPOON became superintendent of Evanston Township High School near Chicago in 2006, he walked into a math class where all the students were black. “A young man leaned over to me and said, ‘This is the dummy class.’”
The kids at Evanston who took honors classes were primarily white; those in the less demanding classes were minority—a pattern repeated, still, almost 60 years after integration, across the nation. All of the Evanston kids had been tracked into their classes based on how they’d performed on a test they took in eighth grade.
Last September, for the first time, most incoming freshmen, ranging from those reading at grade level to those reading far above it, were sitting together in rigorous humanities classes. When I visited, students of all abilities and backgrounds met in small groups to discuss one of the required readings, which include A Raisin in the Sun and The Odyssey. This September, most freshmen will sit side-by-side in biology classes.
Of the 2,974 students at Evanston Township High, 41 percent are low income, 30 percent are black, 16 percent are Hispanic, and 45 percent are white. Whether they’re eating lunch in the cafeteria or high-fiving each other in the bright, striped halls, students of all races intermingle. Yet until the switch, only 19 percent of the students in freshman honors’ humanities classes were minorities. Now minority students represent 39 percent of those taking humanities, and they all have the opportunity to earn honors credit.
Witherspoon’s goal is to establish honors classes across the curriculum because he believes that the achievement levels of minority students will remain low if they aren’t placed in more rigorous classes.
Proposals for “detracking,” sometimes called heterogeneous or mixed-ability grouping, have been around for decades, but the idea has attracted increasing interest in the hope that it would make education more equitable and boost student achievement levels. Schools all over the country—in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, in Alexandria, Virginia, in Townshend, Vermont—started taking steps toward detracking their students over the past year.
TRACKING BEGAN at the turn of the 20th century as a response to a surge in immigration—and therefore a surge in immigrant children. Following a model based on business efficiency and social Darwinism, educators decided that most poor immigrant children were headed straight to a factory after graduation and so would be best served by vocational training. Better-off students, who could expect to go to college, would receive a more rigorous academic education. Over the years, tracking systems were expanded. Today many high schools have
For more than 30 years, Philadelphia has grappled with ways to desegregate its schools.
But little attention has been paid to the patterns of segregation within integrated schools.
While students themselves introduce some degree of social segregation into schools, academic tracking of students into different classes based on perceived ability results in further racial separation.
Often the perceptions guiding schools' decisions about tracking students are influenced by “stereotyping and racism,” observed veteran guidance counselor Doris Shirley.
“We're all guilty of that,” she noted.
Critics say tracking causes separate and unequal spaces to emerge within integrated public schools, and children conclude from this segregation that students with different color skin have and deserve different levels of education – that some are therefore inherently smarter.
Racial separation within schools often begins at the elementary school level with the grouping of students based on their reading levels. There are no districtwide data on that, but the District does have data on students identified as gifted through IQ testing. These children typically get pulled out of their regular classrooms for special enrichment activities in a small class setting.
Over 8,000 African American students in Philadelphia are classified as mentally gifted, just 48 percent of students so classified. African American students comprise 65 percent of Philadelphia's school population.
At the high school level, further evidence of segregated tracks is provided by comparing participation in college-level Advanced Placement (AP) courses in schools that are well integrated.
Central High School's White enrollment is only a few percentage points higher than its African American student population. Yet 219 White Central students took AP exams last year, and only 53 African American students did. Similarly, George Washington High School's African American enrollment is only slightly smaller than the percentage of White students. But there only seven African Americans took AP tests, compared to 186 White students.
Since tracking is based on the belief that teaching can be more effective when it is addressed to relatively homogeneous groups of students, assignments of students to tracks and, hence to classrooms should in theory be based on objective measures such as students' scores on aptitude tests.
But even if the decisions actually are fair and objective, a danger in tracking is that, with higher expectations often generating higher achievement and lower expectations
