About

Why this site?

A friend of mine spent years working on detracking her department. For most of that time, she thought that she and her department were alone– that they were one of the only departments to be attempting detracking. In reality, she wasn’t alone. Nor was her school. Teachers, site leaders, and parents across the country are working on detracking but they have no place to share their work or build connections. The purpose of this site is to build a community of people interested in detracking and to make research on tracking and best practices from practitioners available to everyone.

Why detracking?

In Brown vs the Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that separate was not equal. While that ruling applied to between school segregation, we believe it also applies to segregation within schools. At the end of the 19th century, when tracking began, we openly placed students in track based on their race and class (Oakes, 2005). More than a hundred years later, tracking is continuing to segregate students within schools. Black, Latinx, and low-income students continue to be disproportionately placed in lower track courses (Corra, Scott, & Carter, 2011; Muller et al., 2010). Advanced Placement and honors courses continue to be racially identifiable (Rowland & Shircliffe, 2016). As schools become more racially diverse, they also become more tracked with White students attending the higher level courses and Black and Latinx students attending the lower level courses (Lucas & Berends, 2007). Students in lower level courses have less access to rich learning opportunities and to high status knowledge (Burris, 2014; Oakes, 2005).

Segregation harms students. Segregation is associated with higher drop out rates, less desire to live and work with people who are different from you, and more prejudice (Mickelson, Nkomo, & Wimberly, 2012). Segregation happens not just between schools and districts, but within schools in the form of academic tracking. In order to create schools of equity for all students, we need to address the inequities created by tracking.

To learn more about the history of tracking, check out our history page.

Defining our terms

Almost half a year into her teacher’s working group on detracking, Maika Watanabe realized that, while all of the teachers had the same formal definition of detracking, they had widely varying operational definitions. Some teachers saw their school as detracked because students could choose what courses they took. Others saw the school as deeply tracked because different levels of courses were offered at each grade level and the classes were racially identifiable. These differences in views existed despite months of reading about and discussing detracking (Watanabe, 2007). Our goal is to create as much clarity as possible about terms now to prevent confusion later. For those who go on to explore our research pages, just know that researchers rarely define these terms in their writing and could have different definitions than what we are using here.

Tracking

According to Carol Burris (2014), “Tracking is the sorting of students within a school or district that results in different access to academic curriculum and the opportunity to learn” (p.3).

Jeannie Oakes (2005) defines tracking like this;

“However it is done, tracking, in essence, is sorting– a sorting of students that has certain predictable characteristics. First students are identified in a rather public way as to their intellectual capabilities and accomplishments and separated into a hierarchical system of groups for instruction. Second, these groups are labeled quite openly and characterized in the minds of teachers and others as being of a certain type– high ability, low achieving, slow, average, and so on. Clearly these groups are not equally valued in the school; occasional defensive responses and appearances of special privilege– i.e., small classes, programmed learning, and the like for slower students– rarely mask the essential fact that they are less preferred. Third, individual students in these groups come to be defined by others– both adults and their peers– in terms of these group types…. Fourth, on the basis of these sorting decisions, the groupings of students that results, and the way educators see the students in these groups, teenagers are treated by and experience schools very differently” (p.3).

Years ago, tracking used to refer to complete academic tracks. Students were either on a vocational or college preparatory track and all of their courses were determined by their track. Now, at least in theory, students are able to take classes at different levels in different department. For our purposes, tracks refer to the number of levels of courses offered in a subject and tracking refers to the collection of courses that students take.

Schools, and school districts, have individual policies that determine how students are placed into different courses and how easy or hard it is for students to move into higher level courses. These policies are referred to as “tracking policies.” The entire structure of how tracking works at a school from how students are placed into courses to the number of courses offered is referred to as the “tracking system.”

Sean Kelly, a research who studies tracking, also uses four other terms to describe aspects of track systems. He uses the term inclusiveness to describe the proportion of students in the highest track and the term selectivity to refer to the number of tracks offered at each department. He uses the term electivity to refer to the extent to which students can choose what courses they take and the term scope to refer to extent to which all courses that a student takes tend to be at the same level. At a school with high scope, the student is likely to take the same level of courses across all subjects. At a school with low scope, the students are taking courses at different levels in different subjects (Kelly, 2007; Kelly & Price, 2011).

Detracking

According to Kimberly LaPrade (2011), “Detracking is the process of dismantling institutional and organizational structures or instructional barriers that sort students according to ability” (p.742)

Beth Rubin (2008) has this definition, “the dismantling of ability-driven grouping practices” (p.652).

Our definition here is even more simple. A detracked school would have all students enrolled in the same courses. A detracked department would only offer one level of courses. A school that is in the process of detracking is one that is actively decreasing the number of tracks within each academic department.

Note that even many of the best known schools for detracking offer separate classes for some students with special needs– technically, their school would not count as detracked by this definition. That means that what is most important, more important than how we use the terms is whether a school is detracked or detracking, is being clear about how many different levels of courses are being offered and who is included in or excluded from those courses.

Ability Grouping

Ability grouping is homogeneous grouping that occurs within a classroom. Often parents are not informed about ability grouping and the rigidity of ability grouping will vary between teachers.

References