Eliminating Segregation in Our Schools Today
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.