KEYWORDS: segregation, tracking, detracking, desegregation.

ABSTRACT: With the tracking of students today, the separation of regular and honors courses can illuminate the difference in students’ races and socioeconomic status. In effect, tracking can create segregated classrooms, which only magnify the ethnic achievement gap. For teachers to minimize this gap, and end segregation, it’s necessary for schools to begin the detracking process, where students are not given the option of regular, honors, or advance placement courses, but are instead all enrolled in the same course. Much research has proven that detracking can minimize the achievement gap while providing other benefits like teaching students of collaboration and compassion, encouraging students to be more accepting of others, and holding everyone to high expectations. Of course, this does come with its own drawbacks, like shifting the responsibility of differentiation from a student’s choice of enrollment to the teacher. When students can pick and choose their own classes, it allows students to enroll in a course of the same relative ability, making it easier for a teacher to differentiate. If they were to all enroll in the same course, it can hugely increase the amount of differentiation required, putting more responsibility and time constraints on the teacher. Over all, it depends on one’s perspective on which approach preferred, tracking or detracking, although in the author’s opinion, in order to desegregate modern American classrooms, detracking still remains as the best available option.

By 2014, 13 of Seattle’s rental properties had engaged in housing discrimination, according to Seattle Times (Beekman, 2015, para. 3). “African-American testers, for example, were shown fewer units, quoted higher prices and told more frequently than white testers about criminal-background and credit-history checks” (Beekman, 2015, para. 9), proving that disparate treatment for those of different races still runs rampant today. Seattle’s history of white supremacy has not gone away, and neighborhoods are still segregated by race. Through the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights Project (2016), segregation maps reveal how African Americans were encouraged to live in underprivileged communities (for example, on Martin Luther King Street and Yesler) back in 1920, which has not changed according to the maps from 1960 or 2010, confirming that segregation has not been eliminated. Although segregation was banned in schools in 1954, due to its presence in the natural lay of neighborhoods, segregation has been indirectly enforced in the classrooms. This is not a good thing since it breaks America’s promise of equality. Therefore, segregation remains the greatest challenge that modern teachers can face in their classrooms, since this discourages the American promise of equal opportunity for all.

America’s History of Segregation

Over the years, the United States has experienced multiple variations of segregation. Early in American history, from about 1776, and until very recently in 1964, the US experienced segregation based on one’s skin color. If you were black, you received a different treatment than one who was white. In the beginning when you were a slave, this meant your life was devoted to servitude, but as the country evolved, once you were free, this meant using separate facilities, including schools. However, African Americans were not the only ones who experienced segregation, the Irish did as well.

Around 1840, when most Americans were protestant, the Irish Catholics emigrated from Europe, and because they didn’t follow the mainstream religion, they experienced a lot of Irish racism, which encouraged them to segregate themselves (ELC381site, 2010). Around the same time, Horace Mann began to notice the inequality between schools, specifically those in rural or wealthy areas (ELC381site, 2010). Because those in rural areas could not afford the best or full-time teachers, this meant that one’s socioeconomic status (SES) could determine what kind of school you attended. So, by this point you could be segregated due to three reasons: race, religion, or SES.

It wasn’t until the 1920s, when wartime led to the development of intelligence testing, that schools began a different sort of segregation, one based on your intelligence. Almost immediately, this led to minorities being segregated to the fact they were “slow learners,” which led to two-thirds of Hispanic children being placed in separate schools (ELC381site, 2010). They were probably labeled as such because 74 percent spoke a language other than English and would struggle with English comprehension on these sorts of tests (Webb & Metha, 2017, pp. 201-202). This elicits the beginnings of what we call tracking today. Normally students are tested at a young age, labeled by their mental aptitude, and then segregated into separate courses, usually something like regular or honors. And although, after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, public schools were mandated to desegregate children, “the tracking system essentially translated into a form of resegregation” (Kholi, 2014, para. 20). The public recognizes that whether you’re separating people by race, religion, or intelligence, it is still segregation. It doesn’t help that those in poverty, commonly found to have poor health, usually are more likely to develop learning disabilities, behavioral and emotional problems (Webb & Metha, p. 198). Then, there are those who can’t afford to take the higher-level classes, leading them to be placed in regular mainstream classes. This leaves teachers with the unfortunate fact that their classrooms are segregated, which has been at least partially linked to the ethnic achievement gap—a bigger problem than the gender gap since most of the time it is larger (Webb & Metha, p. 213).

Overcoming Segregation through Inclusion

And if exclusion is the problem, then the only solution is inclusion. An old idea that first surfaced in American history around 1840, Horace Mann originally wanted to create a public school, where both rural and wealthy children could receive equal education. This led him to ask the government to fund schools through tax dollars, hoping that by improving the quality of schools that parents would send their wealthy children to attend, in effect creating a heterogeneous mix of classes (ELC381site, 2010). And if his idea was successful, based on the fact that education today is funded by taxes, then this reverse to the one-size-fits-all approach for classrooms will be successful for the future. In summary, schools need to eliminate tracking and start detracking.

By 1935, this idea surfaced in the form of Janusz Korczak’s theory and practice. “[He] believed too strongly in a community where there were neither races nor classes,” and even before World War II, he rejected all thoughts of a supreme class, rejecting thoughts of a "Jewish Paradise," a "Workers' Paradise," and an "Aryan Paradise” (Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, 2014, para. 16). His educational theory was of comparison to his social program, where he supported “employment opportunities for all, higher sanitary standards—especially among the poorest social classes, providing children with appropriate conditions for their physical and mental development, family life as a value, education for all, equal rights for women, and many other important social issues in Polish society of the time” (Lewowicki, 1994, p. 2). Basically he wanted all children to have equal opportunities for a good education, which to him also included good health and living conditions, but this is not feasible when schools are segregating children based on intelligence.

Currently some schools begin tracking as low as kindergarten, separating students into different educational paths based on their academic performance. For a child, this means after taking an intelligence test, they’re either enrolled in regular or gifted-and-talented (GT) courses. In my own experience, this meant that by the third grade, after multiple renditions of the test courtesy of my parents, I was enrolled in GT while one of my brothers was enrolled there as early as first. This ability grouping grows throughout high school, extending to regular, honors, and advanced placement (AP) courses. So in order to eliminate tracking, in order to reverse the idea, instead of offering more options, we need to offer only one.

This process of detracking starts in a variety of ways. For example, in the New Jersey school district, South Orange Maplewood, they’re thinking of reducing the prerequisites for placing a student in higher level courses, meaning, making it available for more of them (Kholi, 2014, para. 32). In another approach employed by the Rockville Center School District, they have replaced all of their tracked classes with one singular option, the one formerly reserved only for its high-ability students (Welner, 2005, p. 595). Even local schools have begun to offer detracking by simply eliminating the option for regular or honors. Bellevue School District in Washington State now only offers one option per course, although it still offers AP courses to its students. Just to clarify, these AP courses are only offered later in students’ academic careers, meaning that if a student completed the previous four math courses (Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2, and Precalculus), then they could take AP Calculus or AP Statistics.

Benefits of Detracking

There are many benefits to detracking students, besides that of minimizing the ethnic achievement gap, including offering higher expectations for all students, exposing them to more cultures, and teaching them about important life skills like collaboration and compassion. When students are enrolled in a gifted-and-talented course, those not enrolled automatically categorize themselves as unable to compete, or not as smart. This inherently lowers students’ expectations of themselves, since if schools do not have high expectations for them, why would they? This results in these low-achieving students having low self-concepts (Oakes & Lipton, 1999, p. 171 as cited in Burris & Garrity, 2008). If schools were to detrack, they could reverse this process and instead increase expectations for all students, rather than just the high-achievement ones.

Below I will name and briefly describe a few benefits of detracking:

It Teaches Students about Collaboration

There is also the unfortunate drawback that by enrolling students all in the same course, teachers end up with a heterogeneous mix of abilities and the need to differentiate more than they are accustomed to. This can seem like a hindrance until teachers realize that students can be teachers too. By changing the classroom culture, teachers can create the opportunity for students to learn about life skills like collaboration and compassion through learning to help one another. This follows the Ukrainian educator Vasily Sukhomlinsky’s notion that individuals should receive moral education.

He believed that teachers should use opportunities to enforce students to care for their environment, family, and elderly (The Holistic Educator), because “the development of personal qualities such as empathy and compassion [are] as important for the future of the individual and society as instruction in literacy and numeracy” (Cockerill, p. 199). This means that teachers should pride themselves not only on teaching content but also on morals and life skills. And with more and more children being exposed to media, research has found an increase in antisocial behavior, decreased empathy, childhood obesity, eating disorders, and more (Webb & Metha, 2017, p. 195). This leaves it up to teachers to compensate for these detriments by giving students more opportunities to experience compassion and collaborate.

Many philosophies support this idea. Both progressivism and social reconstructionism include a cooperative learning environment in their beliefs, and even Pestalozzi used it to his advantage. He wanted his students to work and learn together, for his schools to resemble a family (Gutek, 1995, p. 223), and his General Method emphasized emotional security through receiving warmth and affection and giving gratitude and love (Gutek, 1995, p. 237). Korczak followed this same system, always wanting to promote a “harmonious educational relationship” (Lewowicki, 1994, p. 4). Similar to Pestalozzi, he believed that schools should resemble a family environment, where older children would take care of younger ones as in a siblings’ relationship (Lewowicki, p. 5). Since when students teach each other, both parties end up benefiting, with the one teaching reinforcing the knowledge and the one receiving learning—the much-needed concepts. Therefore, by detracking, students can gain valuable life skills that can be used in society and later on in the workplace. 

It Teaches Students about Acceptance

Detracking also lends another unique mindset, one that teaches students to be more open-minded and accepting other cultures. Because Caucasians make up the ethnic majority within the U.S., students need to learn to be more accepting, which can only be done so if they are exposed to other cultures. Watching “Omarina’s Story”2 (Robertson, 2014) viewers can see how the student Omarina is one of her few minorities at the school, with the rest of the student body being white. This doesn’t go past Omarina, who comments “some people aren’t aware or haven’t been exposed to certain things and are genuinely curious or genuinely want to know how I do my hair every morning or do I think in Spanish or whether I’m born here” (Robertson). In order to make students more knowledgeable about other cultures, it is necessary for them to be exposed to these cultures, to see other students that might not match their skin, their language, or their culture. By detracking our classrooms, we can ensure that our classes are mixing, and that our students will grow more open-minded.

It Minimizes the Achievement Gap

Finally, detracking has shown a strong relationship to minimizing the ethnic achievement gap. Hanushek, as cited by Kholi (2014, para. 22), found that for eight out of nine countries that track students before age 16, they experienced some of the highest and lowest test scores, a much larger range when compared to countries that don’t track. This means that for schools that do track, they experience a larger, more extreme range, where schools that don’t track experience a much more precise, close range of scores. Even though this begs the question of which is better, it does answer the question of how to eliminate the ethnic achievement gap. These results are echoed in Finland that abolished ability grouping in 1985 and now has the second smallest gap between high and low achievers (Cavanagh, 2005; Linnakyla & Valijarvi, 2005 as cited in Burris, Garrity, 2008). This is again echoed at South Side High School in Rockville Centre, N.Y., where by 1996 only 32 percent of all African American or Hispanic and 88 percent of white or Asian American students earned Regents diplomas,32 and by 2003, had closed the gap so that 82 percent of all African American or Hispanic and 97 percent of all white or Asian American graduates earned Regents diplomas (Burris & Welner, 2005, p. 597). Research proves that detracking does minimize the ethnic achievement gap.

Drawbacks of Detracking

Unfortunately, detracking has its own drawbacks, such as removing choices from students, eliminating valuable differentiation for students, and increasing the difficulty for teachers to differentiate. Because of this, some schools have chosen to continue tracking, due to its own inherent difficulty to detrack.

Disadvantages for Students

One of the biggest motivations for students is making their own choices, but by eliminating the number of class options for students, schools remove this sense of choice, disallowing them to choose their own difficulty or the appropriate classes for their own vocational path. Having the ability to choose for oneself is an old idea, one that Abdera believed about the Athenians (Gutek, 1995, p. 37). When someone chooses something for oneself, they feel a sense of possession, of ownership, and are more likely to take better care of it. Montessori also noticed this and so believed that students should select their own activities and remain in charge of their own learning (MorePublicSchool, 2011). If schools were to detrack and remove the number of classes available, then this removes the responsibility from the student and passes it to the teacher, eliminating some students’ sense of motivation. Because of this, some teachers and schools would rather track and retain their class options.

Other teachers would rather retain the tracking system because removing it entails eliminating some of the valuable differentiation that students receive when you segregate them based on ability. The argument remains that if students are separated based on ability, teachers can better accommodate the class average ability and better cater to students’ needs. For example, when considering students in special education, they may be separated based on the extent of their disability, allowing them to receive the individualized attention they may need. A lot of schools have responded in this manner since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which  “required schools to focus on struggling students and raise proficiency by focusing on test scores” (Kholi, 2014, para. 24). If schools were to detrack, what does this mean for students with their own Individualized Learning Program (IEP)? A lot of schools don’t even have enough resources to support the ones we have now, so how would we be able to accommodate this in the future?

Detracking does not only harm some of the low-achievement students; it also lowers the achievement level for high-ability students. When detracking referenced to eliminating the ethnic achievement gap, it did so at a cost. While it did improve test scores for low-achievement students, it can also lower the high-ability students’ scores. By not receiving any specialized attention, these students may be missing out on more complex instruction. This begs the question if detracking is really worth it if it means eliminating the competitive edge that the US may need for the STEM market.

Disadvantages for Teachers

When students are detracked and are all placed into one course, there is a larger pool of student abilities, meaning a larger range for teachers to differentiate. For teachers without proper training or time to cater to them, this can be difficult. “Teachers who have been assigned to detracked classes often report that they must “teach to the middle” or omit some of the curriculum because they don’t have time to instruct students at every different level within a class period” (Hallinan, 2004, para. 13). For myself, I find it hard to accommodate every student since a lot of the time, I have to spend educating some of the low-achieving students that may be struggling or falling farther behind. “[And] a 2008 survey of American teachers found that 43 percent agree to some extent that their classes are too mixed in terms of their ability to teach effectively. Eliminating tracking might be effective in small classes where teachers can give personal attention to a manageable group of students, but budget constraints—in New Jersey and in many districts around the country—necessitate a high student-to-teacher ratio” (Kholi, 2014, para. 33). Maybe if there were different conditions in place, such as smaller class sizes, then the ability to detrack would be more possible, but with classrooms being packed to the maximum size and districts not being completely funded, it is hard to comply with this vision. In this reality, at least from my perspective, it can be more realistic to track and segregate students than spend time trying to cater to everyone.

Conclusions

To combat the issues of segregation in the classroom, it is necessary for districts and teachers to begin the detracking process, but as shown above, this can come with its own drawbacks. Detracking students can remove motivating factors for students and leave courses too diverse for teachers, making it too difficult to differentiate. And if the current laws in place ask us to segregate students, what happens to the students with their own IEPs that are currently segregated? Much debate surrounds the issue of tracking and detracking, but detracking still remains the best option if teachers would like to eliminate segregation in their classroom. By corralling students into a single classroom, students can be encouraged to collaborate and create a more open mind to other cultures and beliefs. For me, it definitely seems the most appealing option even given the drawbacks, because in my experience in local classrooms, when you can see the segregation in race aligning with the segregation of regular and honors classes, it can divide a school’s community and make it difficult to create a supportive classroom culture.  This is why in present and future policies, many schools in the Seattle area will continue their attempts to detrack the classroom, in order to eliminate segregation and enforce a more cohesive culture. 

References

• Beekman, D. (13 June 2015). Discrimination alleged at 13 Seattle rental properties. Retrieved from http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/13-rental-properties-in-seattle-accused-of-discrimination/
• Burris, C., & Garrity, D. (2008). Detracking for Excellence and Equity. Retrieved from  http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-Tracking-Is-and-How-to-Start-Dismantling-It.aspx
• Burris, C., & Welner, K. (2005). Closing the achievement gap by detracking. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(8), 594-598.
• Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. (2009). Janusz Korczak’s Biograhy. Retrieved from: http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/responses/hergeth/bio.html
• Cockerill, A. (2011). Values education in the Soviet State: The lasting contribution of V.A. Sukhomlinsky. International Journal of Educational Research, 50, 198-204.
• ELC381site. (May 2010). The History of American Education 1770-1890. Retrieved from YouTube.
• ELC381site. (May 2010). The History of American Education 1900-1950. Retrieved from YouTube.
• Gutek, G.L. (1995). A History of the Western Educational Experience. (2nd ed.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.
• Hallinan, M. (2004). The detracking movement. Education Next, 4(4).
• The Holistic Educator. (n.d.). Sukhomlinsky. Retrieved from The Holistic Educator.
• Lewowicki, T. (1994). Janusz Korczak. Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education, XXIV (1/2), 37-48.
• MoreyPublicSchool. (30 April 2011). What is Montessori? Retrieved from YouTube.
• Parker, Brett. (15 February 2013). What is a Steiner School. Retrieved from YouTube.
• Robertson, M. (15 July 2014). Omarina’s story. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/omarinas-story/
• University of Washington. (2016). Seattle Segregation Maps 1920-2010. Retrieved from http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/segregation_maps.htm
• Urban, W., & Wagoner, J. (2014). American Education: A History (5th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Webb, D., & Metha, A. (2017). Foundations of American Education. (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.