“Decision making and independence of thought are stressed for those at “the top” while obedience and acceptance are instilled in those at the lower end of the scale.” (Ansalone 2010)

I’d never thought about school tracking in terms of what personality traits they encouraged in students, but given my experience in the classroom, as a teacher and as a student, the above quote seems plausible.

At a middle school I observed, I remember a student being recommended to move up a track for math, just because of a question they asked during the first week. The student wouldn’t accept a method the teacher gave for performing a computation and argued its illegitimacy with the teacher for a couple minutes in the middle of instruction. The method was a redundant, instructional way of performing a computation; it was taught to this class, presumably, to help students understand the process of performing the computation, but it was not taught to the upper track. The student pointed out the redundancy and refused to do it. Though the student’s objection to that method was not completely valid, the fact that they did object and justified themselves was enough to convince the teacher that they were in the wrong class. I think that plenty of other students in that class might have also noticed the redundancy, but none of them felt entitled to speak out. Does that student’s entitlement really warrant a “higher” level of academic instruction?

The school I’m at right now, ICE, doesn’t track their students – all of the students, of every individual grade, take the same classes. A consequence of ICE’s anti-tracking philosophy (that this reading helped me to recognize) is that all ICE students, regardless of their relative abilities to perform on tests, feel entitled to think independently and to only accept knowledge that they can be convinced of. Would all ICE students be in the advanced track at a different school? Probably. And especially if independence of thought was the only criteria for “advanced” placement. But, would all of those ICE students actually benefit from the faster pacing in those classes? Probably not. Many students would learn more and at a deeper level in slower paced classrooms. Which is (IN MY OPINION) the flaw with ICE’s untracked classrooms. Though all the students are being conditioned to think independently, to make their own decisions, and et cetera, the classes move at a place that is uncomfortably brisk for the slower students and boring to the faster ones.

I think the issue with tracking isn’t so much the idea of separating kids, but the stereotypes concomitant with the separation. Students in slower-paced classrooms are mistakenly expected not to have the same abilities to reason as student in faster ones. As a result, they are taught in ways that often emphasize procedure, memorization, and recitation. However, if we held students in “lower” tracks with the same expectation of independence as students in “higher” tracks, tracked education could benefit all students. As an example, we should expect that every high school student, regardless of track, can (should be taught to) reason mathematically before graduating. Still, only a few of them should take Advanced Calculus in 9th grade.