Life in the Academic Fast Track : Education: The practice of teachers separating students on the basis of their opinions of who is likely to learn faster or slower is dangerous.
Memory takes me back to an elementary school in this brown and white town. It was there, during recess, that I first played with friends. It was there, in the classroom, that I was first set apart from them.
One day, my teacher decided to teach her class by dividing it into six smaller groups. Each group was assigned a symbol to help differentiate it from the others. There were the Triangles. There were the Circles. There were the Squares. I remember being a Hexagon. I remember something else, an odd coincidence: The Hexagons were the smartest kids in the class. These distinctions are not lost on a child of 7.
As anyone who has visited a kindergarten classroom can tell you, children usually end the first year of schooling already well aware of who the smart kids--and not-so-smart kids--are. Yes, we knew. Still, the day we were assigned our shapes, we knew that our teacher knew, too. We would wait for her to call to us, then answer by hurrying to her desk with books in hand.
We knew that, along with our geometrical shapes, our books were different and that each group had different amounts of work to do. The Circles had the easy books, and were expected to read only a few pages at a time. The Triangles had books that were a little more difficult, and they worked harder than the Circles. The Hexagons, as expected, had the most difficult books and worked the hardest.
What I was exposed to, and indeed benefited from, was the educational practice of ability-grouping, or tracking. And if we were being tracked, I was certainly on the right one.
That was nearly 20 years ago. Unfortunately, though circles and squares may have given way to blue birds and red birds, studies show that tracking still persists in our nation’s classrooms. In 1988, a national study of student academic tracking found not only that tracking is “very common” but also that it “becomes more typical during each subsequent school grade.” In primary grades, the study found, most ability-grouping is for reading and math. By the end of middle school, math, reading and English are usually ability-grouped. During high school, English, math, science and social studies are the subjects in which students are most often tracked.
One reason for the resilience of tracking is that those who use it are reluctant to give it up. Educators, searching for efficiency, argue that children of similar abilities should be grouped together for lessons because they absorb knowledge at the same rate.
Still, the practice of teachers separating students on the basis of their opinions of who is likely to learn faster or slower is, by its nature, dangerous. Parents, legislators and researchers have contended that, in integrated school settings, the practical consequence of tracking is that disproportionate numbers of African-American, Latino and Native American students are relegated to slow-learner and low-achieving classes.
Thus, an inevitable consequence of teachers distinguishing between their students based on perceived ability is that one group of students-- minority --receives a label of inferiority and, within the classroom, are considered less intelligent than their white classmates. More troublesome, researchers agree, is that these students themselves soon realize they are carriers of such labels, a realization detrimental to their self-esteem. A loss of self-confidence and self-respect soon follows.
By the time they enter junior high school, these students exhibit defiance and contempt for an educational system that showed its contempt for them years earlier. By the time they enter high school, and having failed to “bond with education,” most of their energy will be directed not at excelling in their academic program but at finding ways to end it.
For those merely content to graduate, there is the self-denial of one’s dreams. During a recent visit to Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to speak with a young man who, after graduation, plans to go to vocational school and later become an electrician. When I asked him why he had made this choice, he said he did not know. When I asked him what his dream job would be, considering all the possibilities in the world and without any limitations, he thought for a moment, bit his lip and whispered with a smile. A policeman.
Given his limited sense of capability, that dream will remain unfulfilled. We will have one more electrician who, in his heart, wanted to be something else. We will have one more person who denied himself, or herself, the right to dream at age 17.
For those who go on to college and graduate and then go on to graduate school, the guilt that comes with success can be considerable. I apologize to my old classmates who were classified by teachers and counselors as the jock or the pretty cheerleader or the popular one who would always have their personality to fall back on. I run into them at the post office and the grocery store. They ask about my life; I search for polite ways to ask about theirs.
I am the beneficiary of a new, perhaps more insidious injustice. Call it: Intra-racial Differentiation. Teachers separating students along racial lines is not new. What’s new is teachers dividing up students of the same race, a phenomenon increasingly evident in elementary and secondary schools. It begins with a frustrated concession that we cannot educate them all, that we must settle for a few success stories. The educational mission is reduced to searching for those bright stars that outshine racial stereotypes.
The labeling takes on a new dimension: Smart Mexican, Dumb Mexican. In that scenario, I was always the Smart Mexican--groomed to take college-prep courses by the same people who were telling the dark-skinned boy next to me that he would be lucky to graduate from high school. He was. My classmates reacted to me with a mixture of suspicion and awe. I remember that being set apart made me feel uncomfortable. Embarrassed. Guilty.
Having briefly taught at the elementary, secondary and university levels, I understand the temptation of educators to track their students, if only to make their difficult jobs a bit easier. Still, by grouping their students according to ability at ages when much of that ability is yet unrealized, teachers set the stage for millions of self-fulfilling prophecies and hinder the future success of the very students they intend to serve.
There is simply no need to discriminate between students in order to teach them. In classrooms, tracking should be considered as unacceptable as corporal punishment. School districts that tolerate tracking should be charged with educational malpractice and held liable for punitive damages on behalf of the student.
Some may see this as ungrateful. Biting the hand that has fed me so well for so long. But I will apologize no more. There are countless others whom the educational system should be feeding. It is not. This Hexagon has had enough.
