Tracking in public schools is supposed to happen when students are placed in certain classes because of their cognitive abilities. When I started teaching in 1984, my Texas middle school had five levels of instruction for every course taught – Pre-IB (International Baccalaureate), Honors, Regular, Basic, and Special Education. Back in the day, adults enjoyed tracking, especially those teachers who taught advanced coursework and therefore advanced learners, and parents whose children were lucky enough to be in advanced courses, either because of their intellectual abilities or their parents’ ability to raise enough hell so that the counselor will place them in their desired class.
Tracking isn’t such a good idea when it comes to kids. If you are lucky enough to be assigned an advanced class, chances are you are going to see an experienced teacher when you walk into the classroom. But if you are assigned to a regular class or below, you stand a good chance of seeing a brand new teacher with little to no experience. Furthermore, based upon my own experience of teaching in a five-level tracking system, teacher expectations, in fact everyone’s expectations, were so, so low for those kids in regular classes and below. What you end up with in a tracked school is that white kids and their families, and teachers of those kids, are generally happy because they are the ones who end up in the advanced classes, while other students and their families, and teachers of those kids, struggle to achieve inside the regular (or below) classroom.
Good for adults, bad for kids. We’ve heard this before when it comes to our current public education system.
Last week, The Washington Post published an article telling the story of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, and its school district’s attempt to end tracking – during the pandemic.
The article begins:
“David Glasner had been superintendent of schools in this Cleveland suburb for less than a year when a single sentence from a fifth-grader left him shaken.”
“He was visiting Woodbury Elementary School, home to the district’s fifth- and sixth-graders, in fall 2019. Here, the sorting of students by ability – or perceived ability – began. Advanced students, about half the grade, were sent to the basement for enriched math and English language. The other half stayed put.”
“Glasner popped his head into a fifth-grade classroom and saw that all but one student were Black. A colleague asked a child sitting in the corner, ‘Where are the White students?’ And the student replied, ‘The White kids – they’re enriched.’”
“He didn’t say the White kids were getting enrichment. They were enriched. In this formulation, it wasn’t just a question of classrooms, but actual identity.”
“’That students has internalized that idea that those White kids are better than him,’ Glasner said later. ‘That one incident was a punch to the gut.’”
“Glasner had already been grappling with how to change a system that seemed to belie the community’s values. The suburb had been founded at the turn of the 20th century as an elite, explicitly racist enclave for wealthy families escaping the city. But beginning in the 1950s, Black and White families came together here to create integrated neighborhoods. They backed busing and drew boundary lines to make school more integrated, while line drawing in other communities had the opposite intent. Student groups formed to celebrate Black achievement and advance race relations.”
“But here, as elsewhere, an academic ‘tracking’ system meant White student dominated advanced classes, with regular and lower-level classes disproportionately occupied by Black students. The disparities resisted various interventions over many years.”
“At the same time, many families – most of them White – prized the advanced classes and saw them as a pillar of the academic excellence that Shaker Heights also cherished.”
“Less than a year after that visit to Woodbury, a solution unexpectedly presented itself to Glasner. It was summer 2020, and the district was trying to figure out how to operate in the pandemic – both online and once students returned to buildings. School leaders realized the schedule would be simpler if they eliminated much of the tracking.”
…
“In retrospect, even many supporters of detracking said it was a mistake to move this quickly in a pandemic – leaving no time for training teachers, preparing parents or explaining the changes in any real detail.”
“The district did little to recruit allies who might have helped sell the change. Glasner did not give the Parent Teacher Organization a heads-up or ask for aid explaining of advocating for it. There was no Q&A document posted on the district website, and there was a lot of misunderstanding about the new policy. For instance, many wrongly concluded that AP and IB classes [advanced courses] at the high school were disappearing or changing, which they were not.”
“The district pressed the philosophical case for detracking with scant details about how it would be accomplished.”
“’People were like, ‘We get the why. We want to understand the how,’ said Sarah Divakarla, a White woman who was PTO co-president.”
“The combination of online learning and detracking delivered a double serving of anxiety. Stacey Hren, the other PTO co-president, who is also White, heard families complain that classes were too slow and no longer assigned homework. She personally knew of five families who left the district with generic explanations like, ‘This is just a better fit for us,’ which Hren read as ‘coded White privilege language.’”
…
“By summer 2023, district officials saw evidence that detracking was producing positive academic results.”
“District data showed that the number of students of all races taking AP classes in high school rising. The number of Black students taking at least one AP course nearly doubled from 53 in 2018-2019 to 98 in 2022-2023. John Moore, director of curriculum, said it was too soon to say whether that change related to detracking, but he did credit a renewed push at the high school to encourage more Black students to try these classes.”
“Most compelling, Moore said, were changes in math scores of eighth-graders…”
“Before the change, very few Black students took Algebra 1 in eighth grade; afterward, almost everyone did. In spring 2021, after the first year of detracking, 44 percent of Black students demonstrated competency in algebra in end-of-year testing, a requirement for high school graduation. Two years later, in spring 2023, that rose to 51 percent.”
“It was still only half the students. Yet under the old system, most of them would never have even been in the class or taken the test in eighth grade.”
Sadly, the story of Shaker Heights is not the story of most schools across the country, especially given these tense racial times everywhere in the U.S. Most schools, especially secondary schools, track students and place them in different classes based on their “abilities.”
I’m not hopeful this will ever change in our present educational system. It seems that our public school system, even after making huge strides toward integration and equity during the 1950’s and 1960’s, now teeters on the brink of being labeled a “racist system.” And tracking, for all the wrong reasons, is a big reason for the racist label.
Individual learning plans are the most integrated, equitable, and fair way for all young learners to have a personalized pathway toward becoming smarter and stronger. Gone are the levels. Gone are the counselors making the wrong decisions for black, brown, and poor kids. Gone are the segregated and racist practices so many of our young learners and their families still face today.
If our public schools aren’t going to be fair places for all young learners to learn, then we need to let our kids out of those places and begin offering them the civil right opportunity of this century – their own learning plan, and their own ability to plan that learning.]
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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