The Negative Effects Of School Tracking

As both the standards of school work and stress levels of student’s rise, the American school system remains unaltered, unchanged, and unaffected for over a hundred years. School is an institution that can serve as a massive gate in life granting you access to a job, stability, and a future or it can become a giant pillar in the way of everything you wish to achieve. While we recognize that a student’s own motivation, study habits, and will to learn, are cardinal in any schooling system, we must also understand the issues with an institution that is fundamentally unsound from the ground up. In today’s world, students are shoved with the hands of docility, and amenability as they render themselves in a system that has inadvertently failed them, by neglecting to celebrate their differences, and varying learning patterns. Conformity in the education system has shown to damage the personalization and

When imagining a well-rounded school, one might think of a school filled with discussion based English classes, interactive Math classes, exciting labs, and rich History classes; one may also think of an endless list of extracurricular activities and athletic teams. Sadly, many public schools across the country do not have these opportunities. The Diane Ravitch book: Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, focuses upon Ravitch’s opinion on this important issue. Since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001, schools have focused on math and reading scores; because of this, schools have disregarded and cut back on other subjects that they are not being tested on such as

non-colored students. To obtain more details about these, I will be utilizing outside sources including, Gillian White’s article, “The Data are Damning: How Race Influences School Funding” and Seth Gershenson’s essay, “The Power of Teacher Expectations: How racial bias hinders student attainment”. These two sources directly correlate with the aspects of schools I want to focus upon. In fact, both of these are multi-modal as they have not only historical facts and personal testimonies, but also statistical data that illustrates how much racial bias is incorporated when deciding how much funds a school receives or how some faculty decide to treat certain groups of students. Referencing this data will definitely strengthen and give my claims a lot of credibility, leading me towards the end of my essay. To convince the remainder of audience who wants even more evidence than what I have presented, I will be ending my essay explaining the negative impact racial bias not only has upon lower grade public schools, but how it is affecting future college students as well. Jackie Kerstetter’s article “Racial bias hinder college degree attainment” extends upon my previous claims about teachers exhibiting racial bias has a negative impact upon colored students for the rest

Ability grouping is the concept of placing students into learning groups within the classroom based on their academic ability level (National Education Association, 2015). This happens more frequently at the primary level when students have only one teacher and one classroom (Loveless, 2013). Ability grouping can be used to teach any subject but is most commonly used in English language arts and mathematics (Loveless, 2013). Ability tracking uses the same concept of grouping students by their academic ability level, but tracking happens at the middle and high school levels (Loveless, 2013). Tracking is the practice of testing students’ ability levels, placing them in groups based on these

High school is often considered a microcosm of society. Beliefs, social order, and current issues present themselves through student’s interactions and the environment they learn in. One of the oldest and still prevalent issues in the United States today is race and equality. So it is no surprise when racial issues are exposed in public education. Although many believe the civil rights era fixed most discrimination, racism remains in schools. Even after court ordered integration, classroom disparities have led to harmful segregation to continue within schools.

For some students, race is a central part of their identity. The struggles they face with it determines the achievements that they can present to the admissions officers. Despite the current ban on the usage of race in college admissions in Michigan, admissions officers should not ignore any part of a student’s unique circumstances, which may be related to one’s socioeconomic status, race, or both. In the article, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Kozol argues that the ongoing racial segregation and the lack of funding in schools consisting primarily of blacks and Hispanics are putting the poor and minority children at an disadvantage by not providing them a chance to have good teachers, classrooms, and other resources. While universities use scores to assess the academic ability of a student, minorities who attend schools segregated based on race or socioeconomic status may excel at what they are given, have the

the term receivement gap is useful because it focuses attention on educational inputs-what the students receive on their educational journey, instead of outputs-their performance on a standardized test. This refocusing also moves attention away from the students as the source of these disparities, and toward the larger structure and forces that play a role in their education and development (p. 417). Venzant-Chambers (2009) asserted the issue of the Black and White achievement gap must be viewed through other lenses opposed to the single view of Black students cannot perform as well as White students. Venzant-Chambers (2009) offered other avenues by which to examine the achievement gap such as school tracking, examining the

A school setting provides opportunities where issues of social justice, oppression, and discrimination can be addressed. According to Bemak and Chung (2009), students of color and economically disadvantaged students are likely to have low academic achievement, in comparison to their White middle class counterparts. These disparities in academic

Millions of children, teenagers, young adults, and adults attend school every Monday through Friday in the United States with the intent to learn and further their knowledge of core subjects. They learn math, science, English, history, and countless other subjects throughout the week of school. In history they learn about how for a long time in American history women were not allowed to go to school and were forbidden get a higher education for even longer. They also learn that for much of American history schools were separated by race. In “The Next Kind of Integration” by Emily Bazelon, the author talks about how in 2008 the Supreme Court ruled in a close decision that the racial-integration efforts of two school districts was unconstitutional. In “When Bright Girls Decide That Math is ‘a Waste of Time’” by Susan Jacoby, Jacoby talks about how gender stereotypes limit girls and young women from being proficient in math and science throughout their life. Even though integrating different races, socioeconomic statuses, and even genders can be difficult, in the long run it leads to better educated students and a better experience in school.

The essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal”, by Jonathan Kozol, discusses the harsh truth of public school systems, and how they have become an isolation and segregation of inequality that students are subjected to; as a result, to receive an education. Throughout the essay, Kozol proves evidence of the inequality that African American and Hispanic children face in the current school systems across the country. Kozol supports his testimony by providing the reader with factual statistics and percentages, of how segregated the public school systems have become within many major cities. He exposes the details and statistic of how wealthier schools received better funding and opportunity than the low-income and poverty struck school systems throughout the major cities across the country.

“Unintended Educational and Social Consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, no. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 311. EBSCOhost. In this peer-reviewed academic journal article, Liz Hollingworth, an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Iowa, explores the history of school reform in the United States, and the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Hollingworth states that the great promise of NCLB is that schools will focus on the education of low-achieving students, reducing the gap in student academic achievement between White students and African-American, Hispanic, and Native American student populations. Hollingworth states that an unintended consequence of NCLB was that teachers and school administrators had to shift curriculum focus in an effort to raise test scores, but in some cases, they had to also abandoned thoughtful, research-based classroom practices in exchange for test preparation. NCLB also affected teachers, highly qualified teachers left high-poverty schools, with low performance rates especially those schools where teacher salaries are tied to student academic performance. Hollingworth concludes her article by stating “we need to be wary of policy innovations that amount to simply rearranging the deck chairs on the

Tracking can lead to segregation based on race. For Example, according to the article “Modern Day Segregation in Public schools” by Sonali Kohli, ¨Black and Latino students represented 16 percent and 21 percent of high school enrollment nationwide, respectively. But they were only 8 percent

The phrase “acting white” has plagued our schools and led students to believe that acting white meant conforming to the white dominant school culture. According to Prudence L. Carter “Black students equate speaking Standard English and other achievement oriented behavior…. with whites. And to avoid being labeled as white these students succumb to peer pressure not to do well in school”. This reading goes into understanding the achievement gap between black and white students by understanding the factors that are associated with student’s attachment to school. In addition, it goes on to identifying students based on how the forces of social satisfaction- race, ethnicity, poverty, and culture- really affect student’s lives both inside and outside

Throughout American history, public school’s undergo the most dramatic changes that are occurring in society. These dramatic changes in public schools include charter schools, desegregation, and no child left behind organization. Education is an access to opportunities, as well as a pathway for young students to pursue and be fruitful. Although in the United States, education is unequal due to segregation being a major problem in the United States that has been facing with. Segregation in the classrooms is a problem in public schools. Columbia High School was one of the schools in the United States that was a segregated school. Columbia High School is a campus that is well known with great academics, good sport teams,

expectations for all students can combat marginalization. The schools included in a study by Ragland, Clubine, Constable, Smith, Council of Chief State School Officers and Texas University (2002) set measurable and high goals for all of its students, while minimizing formal categories and labels. This enables faculty and staff to focus on creating educational opportunities for the students and assess areas for improvement in student and teacher performance. Without tracking and labels, the focus is on the individual, where it belongs, regardless of race or socio-economic status”, ( Carbone II,Steven,2010)