Blog Post #3

For my third blog post, I read the article “School tracking Harms Millions, Sociologist Finds,” from the Stanford University News Services. This article works as a great parallel to the tracking portion of Chapter 4 of Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. This summary of this article is the compilation of all of the negative affects that tracking can have on students, especially when in high school. The article also agrees that tracking is a system that does no good when met with the demands for a more multicultural education in America. The article explains that one of the shocking parts of tracking is that students and parents in the schools may not even be aware that it is going on, because it is never clearly stated whether the classes they are taking are college preparatory or not. This might be intentional of the schools, the article explains, because this helps them avoid the many complaints and requests they would receive from students and their families.

            Chapter 4 of Affirming Diversity states that, “Research over many years has confirmed that tracking is frequently linked with racial, ethnic, and social-class differences,” (110). The article I read for my blog is just another believer in this situation. The article claims that not only does tracking limit the opportunities for the high-achieving students, but it is particularly “disastrous” for students who find themselves to fall in the middle range. A research experiment that was conducted in this article consisted of researches selecting randomly an equal proportion of students with high, middle, and low grades for each gender-ethnicity combination (so that there were no ethnic differences in school grades for their sample). After comparing the students’ schools records to their current placements, here were the results: “The researchers found that the proportion of high-ability African American and Latino American students not taking college prep courses in math and science was more than twice that of white and Asian American students of the same ability level,” (Standford University). In my personal opinion, this is an eye catching statistic that should not go ignored, and should be an alarm to administrators everywhere that tracking in high schools has to end.