Jewish Public Forum Archive
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"The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission," a seminar of CLAL’s Jewish Public Forum held March 18-19, 2002 in New York City, brought together leading thinkers on education, culture, Judaic studies, and online learning. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants’ contributions to the seminar.
This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more information about the project, click here.
Dr. Beth Rubin is an assistant professor of social studies education at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. She has worked as a high school teacher in Bay Area public schools, teaching social studies and English. She is interested in how students negotiate and enact equity- geared school reforms in integrated schools, in the interplay of students' social and academic worlds in the high school setting, and in how students construct competence across contexts. Her contribution to the JPF Seminar follows below.
Educational Reform in the Daily
Lives of Students
By Beth Rubin
One of the biggest issues facing
educational institutions in this country is the growing achievement gap between students
from different race and class backgrounds. “Detracking,”
an educational reform that I know intimately from studying it, can offer some ideas about
how we might reframe our approach to this critical challenge. I would argue that we cannot begin to imagine
what the future of education will really be like until we have a good sense of the
complicated texture of students’ days, and of how the large-scale changes that get
implemented in schools resonate through that intricate weave. In my ethnographic research, which involved
following students around and talking with them to find out how detracking played out in
their experiences, I discovered that such up-close and intimate ways of looking are
crucial for understanding how what some imagine to be stunning social changes are actually
understood by individuals in their daily lives.
To begin with, let me outline some
facts about the achievement gap we’ve all heard about:
· Today’s white kindergarten students in 2021 (at age 24)
will be twice as likely as their African American classmates, and three times as likely as
their Latino classmates, to have a college degree.
· In 1996, several national tests showed African American and
Latino 12th graders scoring roughly the same levels in reading and math as
white 8th graders.
This gap, often cast as a racial
achievement gap, is linked to social class as well:
· Latino children were 2.2 times more likely to grow up in poverty
a decade ago, and will be 2.6 times more likely to be poor in 2015.
But stubborn gaps seem to persist
even in integrated, middle class suburbs. That
is, even when students from different race and class backgrounds attend the very same
school, this gap continues.
Detracking is a school reform
designed to address this achievement gap. I became particularly interested in detracking
because it was supposed to address inequities between students from different race and
class backgrounds attending the same schools. I wanted to know what detracking looked like
on the ground, so to speak.
Detracking defines itself, of course,
relative to the more common practice of grouping kids and organizing curricula in high
schools—as well as in many middle and even elementary schools—according to
perceived ability. Students are assigned to
higher or lower tracks (also referred to by such terms as “slower” and
“faster,” or “advanced,” “average,” “low average,”
and so on) on the basis of a variety of factors: test scores, grades, teacher
recommendations, meetings with school counselors, and parent advocacy.
Researchers have long argued that
tracking is linked to inequitable educational opportunities and outcomes within schools. Poor and minority students overwhelmingly end up
in the lower tracks; white and more affluent students overwhelmingly end up in higher
tracks. In desegregated schools, tracking
often re-segregates the student body. The quality of teaching has been documented as
noticeably poorer in lower tracks. There is
little mobility between tracks. Students
leave upper tracks ready for college, with impressive transcripts. The reverse is true for
students in lower track classes.
The idea of detracking is to counter
these trends by placing students in heterogeneous groups.
There is a lot of heat around the issues of tracking and detracking –
people are passionate critics or passionate advocates.
The subject seems to tap into deep-seated beliefs about ability,
intelligence, race, and whether the United States is a meritocracy—whether, indeed,
it is even a democracy. For all this
abstract passion, there has been little research into what is actually going on in
detracked classrooms, particularly from a student’s perspective.
I decided to follow one group of
students through their ninth grade year in a pair of detracked English and history
classes. This was in a school with a stark
achievement gap, a gap linked both to race and social class. Detracking had been implemented by teachers
committed to social equity, over the objections of more affluent members of the community
who were concerned that higher achieving (read “white, upper middle class”)
students would be held back by being put alongside their “lower achieving”
peers.
I observed the students in their
detracked classes, interviewed them at the beginning and end of the year, and followed
five of them to all of their other classes as well. I
became very interested in how detracking fit in with the rest of the kids’ school
days, how their social relationships differed (or not) between tracked and detracked
classes, how they saw themselves as students in the tracked and detracked settings. To illustrate some of my findings, I’ll talk
briefly about three students who had very different experiences with detracking:
Tiffany was an African American student from a working class family. She was tracked low in her other classes, and
mis-advised into pre-algebra, which she had already taken in eighth grade. She had a great deal of responsibility at home.
Her mother was chronically ill, and Tiffany took care of her. In addition, Tiffany also took care of her niece
and the infant daughter of her sister’s friend.
Tiffany brought the two children to day care in the morning and picked them up in
the afternoon, babysitting them well into the evening.
She struggled with the innovative and reading-heavy assignments of the detracked
core and often came to class unprepared. During group work activities, her peers
frequently ignored her. “They
don’t think I’m smart,” she told her English teacher after one such
incident. By the end of the year, she was no
longer participating in her detracked classes, and was failing history. Even so, her 2.0 was the best grade point average
she had ever had, better than the rest of the girls in her main group of friends, and she
and her mother were pleased.
Sasha was a white student from an upper middle class family. She was tracked high in her other classes, with
advanced math and foreign language classes insuring she would end up with a very
impressive high school transcript by the time she was ready for college. Although she had struggled in her middle school
math class, her parents made sure that she enrolled in geometry as a ninth grader, hiring
a private tutor to support her in a class that was a bit of a stretch. Her interest in the arts was nurtured by her
enrollment in her school’s photography class, and by an unpaid internship at an
animation studio after school, arranged by her mother.
Sasha’s friends at Cedar High were academically oriented. “In my central
group, we’re all pretty much equal and try really hard to do well,” she told me.
“I don’t hang out with people that really don’t care, because they’re
so different.” Between classes,
Sasha and her friends could be heard consulting about their class work, talking about
school projects, and planning next year’s course selection. Sasha flourished in her detracked English and
history classes, using the innovative assignments as a platform to express herself
creatively. She became a sought-after group member—a “group-maker,”
according to her teachers. She finished the year extremely positive about both academic
content of the core and the experience of being in such a diverse class. “[What] you’re going to remember is
going to be all the relationships,” she told me, “All the different people you
worked with and how to work with those people. You’re
going to carry that a lot longer than you are how to find the area of a triangle or
something.”
Kiana was a biracial student from a middle class, professional
family. She was tracked in the middle in her
tracked classes – assigned to Algebra I and Spanish I, although she found both of
these classes too easy, and she had taken Algebra I already. Kiana was thrilled to be at diverse Cedar –
she was the only student of color in her previous school, and she was excited to be in a
place where she hoped all aspects of her identity would be valued. “I’m
both,” she told me in September, referring to her racial identity. Kiana was a high achieving student, displeased
when her grade point average dipped to a 3.7. As
the year progressed, Kiana increasingly began to identify with an African American peer
group. “It’s hard for me because I’m half white and half black and I guess
I just side more with my black side. But I don’t think I really have a choice but to
identify with it.” She found that many members of this peer group were less
academically oriented than she was. In the
detracked class she sometimes felt conflicted, wanting to sit with her African American
friends (including Tiffany) but finding it difficult to concentrate on her schoolwork when
she did so. The innovative assignments of the
detracked class engaged her, however, and she did well in both English and history. She
was considered by her teachers to be the “ideal student.”
Focusing on the experiences of
students led me to draw some different conclusions about detracking than other researchers
had. First, sitting kids from different class
and race backgrounds next to each other does not seem to hold any special magic. The achievement gap has complex roots:
students’ home resources, school structure, classroom practices, and the types of
knowledge valued within schools all come together to shape students’ school
experiences. Second, heterogeneous grouping
is in no way a barrier to a high quality education for students (like Sasha) who are
already well served by our educational system. A
quality detracked program, like the one I studied, has much to offer such students.
If detracking is to work, we are
going to have to think creatively about how the larger social problems that produced the
disparity between Sasha and Tiffany’s experiences might be addressed. This is true of
the achievement gap in general.
Tiffany’s case, for instance,
highlights the shortcomings of both our health care system and our child care system (or
lack thereof). Sasha’s case shows how
many more resources are available to support an affluent child, even when she attends a
public school. What could be done to provide
some of these opportunities and supports across the board?
Kiana’s case illustrates the
tension between social and academic worlds that is so daunting for some students. What could be done to relieve this tension? Could the school environment be intentionally
constructed to lessen the divide among students, to support broader conceptions of racial
and academic identity?
I
think there is a lot that schools and other institutions can do to work on these issues,
but we’re going to have to step beyond our prevailing paradigms for creating
opportunities for kids in schools. We have to
think about kids’ whole social worlds, and about their resources in the broadest
sense. We need good child care, more access to interesting opportunities for kids who
aren’t rich, more humane health care
policies, more attention to kids’ relationships with each other, and hard core
academic support systems.
Of course, these are not original
prescriptions for good social policy. But naming them in the context of discussing
detracking reminds us that it is more difficult to implement the things we know will help
than to dream about radical transformations that might make this daily work unnecessary. Ethnographic method reveals the intricacies of
people’s lives, and the way that reforms aimed at solving social problems don’t
ever turn out as intended because people’s lives are complex, varied, and constantly
changing. By listening closely and watching
carefully, we may come to understand some of what is meaningful to the people involved
with any given reform and, in so doing, better imagine how any attempted change might play
out in real life.
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