Is Tracking In (Again)?
Administrators who have just mastered their Superintendents’ enthusiastic spiels for “detracking,” may have to dust off their old arguments for doing the opposite, if Dirk Olin’s September 28, 2003 article in the New York Times Magazine accurately reflects the sorry state of educational philosophy:
… in recent years a number of educational theorists have come to the defense of tracking, and the many parents who resisted the reformation (perhaps believing their own children would excel in the higher tracks). According to Tom Loveless, a former professor of public policy at Harvard who directs the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, studies show tracking can help the highly placed while remaining largely neutral in its effects on those in lower strata.
In 1848, Horace Mann called public schools in America ‘the great equalizer’. Cleaving to that vision, however, brings up the question: At what point do we allow for – much less encourage – the pursuit of excellence? It is beyond dispute that tracking must avoid deterministic straitjacketing by allowing for ‘retracking’.
The Times recommends reading the following:
“Keeping Track,” by Jennie Oakes“Bridging the Achievement Gap,” edited by Tom Chubb and Tom Loveless.“Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century,” from the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development“The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy” Tom Loveless (Brookings Institution Press, 1999)