Interview Participant:
- The interviewee was my brother, who has written his undergraduate thesis on tracking in public schools and is working on his PhD in sociology at Emory with his doctorate's focus on tracking as well.
- These bullet points are summaries of the participant's statements to these questions.
What's the history behind tracking in public schools in the United States?
- In 1954, the Supreme Court ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education came out, which desegregated public schools in the south. Following this ruling, the Southern states got rid of public schools in the south for around seven years until the Federal government mandated the reinstitution of public schools. During this period of time, Southern states provided tests for acceptance into private schools and these tests were entirely biased against non-white students and lower-income students so that wealthier white kids had easier tests or no tests at all to get into private schools. When public schools were reinstated, these tests formed the basis for tracking tests so that southern states could segregate classrooms if their schools had to be integrated.
- Although these racist attitudes that caused these tests and tracking to begin might be gone, the structural racism of this system remains.
Why do you think that tracking in U.S. public schools is important?
- Based upon pre- and post-tests, which most public schools use for presenting successful teaching in order to receive funding, students in higher tracks do not perform better due to these accelerated courses to a statistically significant degree when comparing to students in detracked schools. Students in higher tracks do have higher self-confidence and better attitudes about learning then students in lower tracks.
- The main issue is that there are strong ties to racial and socioeconomic divides within public school tracking. Middle and upper class white students are much more likely to be in accelerated tracks.
What do you think the replacement or alternative to tracking in public schools can be?
- Currently a lot of schools that do not track have replaced tracking with ability grouping even at higher levels of education, like middle and high school. Ability grouping is splitting up classrooms into groups with different learning skills, like putting all the fast readers in one group and slow readers in another. However, this ability grouping system sees accelerated groups getting more attention than other groups.
- Simply having a detracked classroom might be the best system, where students are not tracked to accelerated or lower level classes or put in different groups. This system of equality has seen higher achieving students that would typically be on the upper track as performing the same or higher on average and lower skilled studetns performing significantly better. The higher skilled students also seem to develop stronger social skills in detracked classrooms.