There are substantial and systemic race-linked disparities in educational opportunities, performance, and outcomes throughout the United States, at all levels of schooling.
It has become an article of faith in K-12 education circles that tracking is at the root of these disparities. Tracking is the practice of assigning students to different classrooms based on their academic abilities.
Supporters of de-tracking argue that tracking serves as an amplifier for inequality, making it harder for minority and low-income students to access valuable educational resources. They also argue that the removal of tracking – including honors classes and “advanced” and accelerated pathways – does not harm high-performing students in any way.
In recent years, this perspective has become dominant in schools of education. However, it has two severe flaws:
Weak to nonexistent evidence that de-tracking enhances equity.
Adherents of de-tracking cannot point to any examples of schools that have de-tracked and then achieved desired equitable student outcomes. Moreover, they misrepresent the academic literature on tracking, which is quite mixed. Almost all studies of untracked or de-tracked schools are not designed to support generalizable findings.
Both common sense and empirical research indicate that all students benefit from instruction that is highly targeted to their abilities. This fact is simply disregarded by de-tracking advocates. The optimal amount of tracking in a school reflects a compromise between targeted, personalized instruction and the sharing of common resources; to conclude that this amount should be zero everywhere is a purely ideological statement.
A lack of concern with equity outside the classroom.
Equity in education is important because education is a transformative experience that opens doors and creates opportunities for students outside the classroom. If public educators measure success entirely on how well they reduce disparities within the classroom, they abandon their mission to do their best for each individual student.
For example, if accelerated coursework is important to prepare students for scientific careers, an anti-acceleration philosophy will increase the relative advantages of students with private resources and connections and will not produce equity in science, even if it produces more equitable outcomes within science classes in public schools.