The High Track (not referencing any kind of drugs)

So, when I came into Grand Valley I never really thought of myself as being singled out at all as far as education. I’m a middle-class, white male from a sub-standard size town. It never went through my mind that, because I was part of the smarter kids in school, I had been subjected to a narrow kind of education. Looking back, I see that my Advanced Placement courses were, indeed, a way of singling out students. The students who were, along with me, in all the AP classes were not socially surrounded by our true peers, merely those taking the AP courses. This “High-Tracking” is something I feel I really need to address in this blog because socially it is just as harmful as “Low-Tracking” is to those students education. Take for instance this article:
Phi Delta Kappan
In the article, they talk about the statistics of minorities in low-tracked classes. Now the school I came from did not have a lot of diversity. I would venture a guess to say that less than Ten Percent of the population was of the minority sort. Looking back, though, I am almost sure that out of the ten percent, a great majority were represented in the low-track kind of classes. The social iniquities that the high-tracked students received were atrocious. Never having been really socially connected with a lot of these students, we were taught to almost pity them. Now, as an adult, I see that is the complete wrong way to look at those who are socially, economically, or physically challenged. The people that were over-represented in the low-tracked classes were just as good as we were and definitely not looking for pity, just friendship. In this way, high-tracking classes are indeed just as detrimental to students growth as low-tracked classes.

~ by thedarksideofdan on April 17, 2007.