I consider myself a victim of tracking. My sixth-grade elementary school teacher, completely on her own perceptions of my aptitude, placed me in remedial mathematics and average English for my first year of Junior High School (that’s “Middle School” for most of you out there). I don’t bare that woman any ill-will for passing such judgment on me some 20-years ago, but I do still hate the system that gave this person of spurious qualifications so much power over my destiny.
So I ploughed through remedial Algebra I. Through pure chance, a friend of mine was taking summer school and mentioned to me that I could work my way up to advanced-level mathematics by taking the next year’s class that summer. So I did, and within two years of summer schooling, I was able to earn my way into Advanced Calculus.
No such system existed for English however. The only way to “earn” your way into advanced English was for your average English teacher to notice your aptitude and promote you to the next level. I was lucky in that respect, as my 10th grade English teacher noticed I was reasonably intelligent and advised me into an advanced-level English class.
By my senior year of High School, I was “AP”-Everything. That is to say I was taking college-level math, English, science, German, and government classes–not bad for a class-clown tracked into average English and remedial math.
Many people would characterize my experiences in the system as an example of its success, but I would call “shenanigans” on them.
There are different cultures in the different tracks. My friends who were tracked in the remedial levels described their classrooms as holding-pens, where delinquents reigned and inept teachers merely rode out the years awaiting each payday. I don’t have any way to describe my averagely tracked classes, except to say that they left me with no impressions at all — I suppose that’s apropos.
I do remember the advanced and AP classes, where I could easily fall prey to applying the bigoted term “Cultural Elitism” to the students I met there. While I had spent five years smoking in the boy’s room with the future-dropouts-of-America clan, these students had spent that same time trading big words, politically aware humor, and other big-brained kitsch with wide-eyed enthusiasm. I became the square peg in the round hole, responding to their attempts at friendship, which were completely alien and incomprehensible to me, like a deer caught in the headlights. It was an awful, alienated time in my life.
Luckily (and I hope your listening all of you out there in public school), when I got to college, there was no tracking. Everyone in College has to take the same classes with everyone else. Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the institution!
And you know what else? Everything you were in High School doesn’t mean squat when you get to College. Just like everything you were in College doesn’t mean squat when you get into the real world. It’s never too late to reinvent yourself. It’s too bad public school tries to make itself the end-all-be-all of our lives. A little perspective could really help some student’s out.
On one level, tracking students into classes customized to their proficiency seems pretty ideal. Advanced students get more challenging work and remedial students get simplified tasks. Young minds must be challenged if we are to spark that glimmer of understanding in them. How are remedial students to obtain that spark surrounded by other remedials while being taught by teachers with lowered expectations?
The artificially imposed categorization of students according to their subjectively defined intelligences creates a cultural divide deleterious to students of all aptitude levels. Advanced students, insulated from Average and Remedial students, are never challenged to express their ideas in a manner accessible to the other 95% of the student body. Studies have found that a room full of elitists will make more mistakes than a room with a mixture of aptitudes. This is because Elitist will not challenge one another, but one remedial will challenge them all and make them falsify their hypotheses.
Remedial students, prevented access to Advanced students, are unable to learn from those who are their peers. Advanced students do not serve as shining examples to others when they are sequestered into rooms with other big-brains. This system socially-handicaps both ends of the spectrum, segregating them in a world where they are all equals. I know, because I experienced these problems first-hand, straddling the social circles of the geeks and the dropouts and never fitting into either.
These are all people who are going to have to get along in the real world, why not emulate the real world in the school system? Put them all in the classroom together and let them work things out.