I Don’t Know if There is a 100% Answer

As is well known, Students of minority status are, percentage wise, over-represented in lower tracking classes. Jeannie Oakes’ Keeping Track demonstrates this fact over and over again as she shows the unfair traits of the tracking system. She even talks about how most take the tracking system as a for-gone factor of education, like it is so ingrained in the system that it is almost immovable. Tracking, with its racial bias demonstrated in Keeping Track, seems to be a modern version of segregation. In further posts on this blog, I would like to see if tracking has ever made it to the Supreme Court on this basis. For this post, though, I would like to focus more on the racial inequality reached in the classroom. There was an article in the Seattle Times dealing with the Seattle School Board and how they were handling the racial gap between students in the school. The link for the article is as follows:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003640838_racesupe29m.html?syndication=rss

The article doesn’t focus necessarily on tracking, but it talks about institutional racism and its existence in Seattle public schools. My favorite quote from the article was:
“Her phrase prompted discussion among board members who wondered how the ideal applicant should answer their questions about racism in education. Board President Cheryl Chow asked: “What would be the correct answer? A correct answer in whose definition? I don’t know if there is a 100 percent right answer.”

To me, this quote identifies a serious problem that I have with Tracking as a whole. What answer is there out there to solve it and what is the correct answer in whose definition? I know for a fact that in high school it felt good to be on the “upper-track” of classes and kind of above other people. I know that there has to be other people that felt this way/feel this way about the issue. I do not feel that tracking is a good thing now, for sure, because of its inefficiency in making a well versed society. What I do not understand, though, is how to solve the racial inequalities in tracking. As in all things, the worst thing to do is just to go around and start fitting square pegs into round holes. The first thing to do is baby-steps, at least make the tracking system we have fair as it can be. The article itself goes on to say how there are:
“There are institutional factors leading to the racial education gap”

I think this is hinting at the racial inequality that tracking reaches, even though the article doesn’t mention tracking as a whole. The changes needed to be made, or if you prefer the “answers” needed to be reached, lie in the education system as a whole. Not in teachers, or students, or lunch-rooms, but in the system itself. A valid point that the article makes is about how summer break only furthers the gap of struggling students. While I do not think abolishing summer break is the answer, I do think that this is an idea in the right direction. Instead of tracking kids into “bad kids/good kids” categories, I think we teach everyone all the same and then utilize summer-school as a way to keep pushing the struggling students further and further. While this still is a form of tracking, I can see, it also levels what we are teaching to everyone. This, I think, is a good step forward to getting more answers.

~ by thedarksideofdan on March 29, 2007.