Is Academic Tracking a Bad Thing?

Is academic tracking a bad thing?

I think the research has always indicated that yes, it's a bad thing.

We should not sort students into college prep and academic tracks or vocational and academic.

The idea that there is educational benefit to separating students, especially earlier in their educational careers, I think just has not held up well to scrutiny.

And certainly we don't want to decide for students, especially at the elementary or middle level, you know, what they're going to be in life, how, you know, how successful they're going to be academically, what they're going to do after high school.

Like it is too early to make that kind of determination for a student.

But at some point, I think it is inevitable that we're going to deal with de facto tracking and de facto tracking works like this.

If you have marching band, well, marching band has to be a certain period, and that determines the rest of the student's schedule.

And even if you don't have advanced English, well, at some point, you're going to have all of the students who are in marching band in a certain English class, and that's going to have an effect on what that class is capable of and the pacing of that class and probably the teacher's expectations of that class.

So we're always going to have schedule artifacts that produce some sort of de facto tracking.

And we're always going to have classes that are more difficult and optional, like pre-calculus, calculus.

You know, if you did not pass Algebra 1 in the ninth grade, there's virtually no chance that you're going to take calculus in high school.

And that doesn't mean that nobody should be able to take calculus in high school.

So we have to have a certain degree of kind of ability and choice based differentiation in high school courses.

But I think we really need to be careful to wait until high school to allow those kind of divergent paths, because at that point, it's pretty clear.

what is and is not going to be possible within the high school career for any given student.

And I think we should always push students to try to go beyond maybe people's expectations for them.

I think we should always let students make an effort when we don't believe they can.

I don't think it should be our job to say, I don't think you can do this.

But I do think there is a reality that we run into, especially at the high school level, where, you know, like if you want to do well in chemistry, you have to have certain math skills.

If you want to take higher math, you have to pass the lower math.

And there's no universe in which we can wave a magic wand and make that not true.

Like knowledge depends on other knowledge.

And as much as we want to eliminate barriers in the name of equity, we have to do that by building the knowledge that students need to move into those advanced classes.

And I don't think that is tracking.

I don't think it's right to see it that way.

But we're always going to end up with some real differences in who's taking what.

And I don't know.

Let me know what you think about that.

Is that something that we should be fighting against harder?

Is it something we should be leaning into a little bit more?

More purposefully, like, you know, Germany is very well known for its vocational programs that are highly successful in getting students into better paying careers.

And we're frankly not very good at that in this country.

Maybe if we were more intentional about it, we'd do a better job of it.

Let me know what you think.