The Case for Detracking

And why and how it can actually work

A few months ago education professor Margaret Thornton — who I’ve known from Twitter for years — emailed me, wondering if I had any interest in detracking. (Detracking, as Thornton elaborates below, is the process by which a school works to reverse the explicit and implicit ways it’s “tracked” students into certain educational and life pathways). I said yes, not just because I’m always interested in the hard work of rectifying systemic injustice (that sounds lofty, but it is indeed one of my interests, as I know it’s many of yours)….but also because I’ve done a lot of hard thinking and self-interrogation when it comes to tracking.

You’ll see more of what I’m talking about in my questions below, but basically: I was a very bored kid for most of school and craved any sort of tracking. Fantasized about it. The one day a week I did get it in elementary school — a well-intentioned but faulty afternoon Gifted and Talented program — felt precious beyond measure. So as an adult, I’ve spent a lot of time unlearning the understanding that “untracked” means “unchallenging for me.” (And just generally trying to decenter myself from my thinking on it, too….even as I insert myself back in here as a means of entry for those who might working through similar thoughts).

Thornton and I talk through her new research, which includes case studies of high schools across the United States at different stages in their untracking work. And wow is it work. It is work for administrators and so much work for teachers and work for parents and caregivers and work for the students. But the work is hard because the work is so very worth doing, and I hope this conversation gives you a window into why.

Margaret Thornton is an assistant professor of educational leadership and research at Rowan University’s College of Education. You can find more about her work here and find her book (with academic library pricing still in effect) here.

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First, I want to say that detracking is an area that I am 100% philosophically on board with — but that also challenges me in ways that make me embarrassed. All I wanted as a kid was to be tracked into more highly specialized classes. From elementary through high school, I was consistently bored and frustrated that my teachers would put me in small groups where I spent a lot of time helping my classmates. The selfish, individualist part of me thinks: this was unfair to *me.* The collectivist in me counters: actually, you learned a ton by explaining concepts to others, and only assholes get to do exactly what they want at exactly the same pace all of the time. 

My thinking has really come to land on the idea that how you feel about tracking has everything to do with whether and how it benefited you. So I’m hoping we can distance ourselves from that line of thinking right from the start. What do we know about the harms of tracking? 

I personally never gave tracking a moment’s thought when I was in school until I was a high school English teacher. I was teaching a class for kids who had passed the standardized test they needed to graduate but had failed the associated English class. I would often be the only white person in the room. Research bears out what I experienced as a teacher: even when we hold students’ previous test scores constant, Black, Hispanic, and poor kids are more likely to end up in “lower” level classes which in turn damage their chances of getting into college at a time when a college degree offers returns in terms of not just wages but also life expectancy. “Lower” track placement can also harm students’ opportunity to learn new things as well as the way they feel about school in general.

By contrast, students in “higher” level classes are more likely to go on to college and reap those rewards. Tracking leads to a lot of racial and socioeconomic stratification that really calls into question our culture’s myth of meritocracy. One of the many ways I personally benefited from tracking was being able to graduate college in three years and save a lot of money right before the 2008 economic crash because I had been able to take so many AP classes I came into college with advanced academic standing. Also, like so many, I had a really wonderful time in college and think anyone who wants to go should be able to give it a reasonable shot with the appropriate tools from high school.

I do want to say that I think your individualist concerns are valid, and they do not need to be in tension with the collectivist in this instance! This is a really common concern around detracking, and I don’t think we have to magic away the needs of kids who are already highly-skilled in a particular subject. My experience has been that with the right mix of administrative support, family engagement, and teacher training, not only can we meet the needs of most students in the same classroom but all students can find their school experiences enriched by working with kids from different backgrounds and with different interests.

There are some concrete examples of this mix in my book. I also think that kids can have really mixed experiences with tracking. While I largely benefitted from tracking throughout my school career, in seventh grade I was placed on a math track that meant taking calculus senior year. When I got to high school, I was at a much smaller school that didn’t offer calculus every year, and I missed the chance to take it, something which I think does affect some of the quantitative work I want to do in my own research. So, tracking can be a mixed bag even in terms of how kids at “the top” experience it.  

As a way of introducing your case studies — what makes it so hard to de-track?

I think the first obstacle, frankly, is the imagination of educators. Tracking worked for a lot of educators (including me!), and it has been the norm pretty much since high school as we know it was invented in the United States. It didn’t really occur to me that there was another way until I as a teacher was faced with racially-identifiable classes and the institutional press that made me plan essentially the same activities for my “upper” and “lower” level classes. I didn’t have time to come up with five different sets of lesson plans when it was obvious to me that about 80% of my students were capable of doing the same type of work and having the appropriate challenge. Setting my classes up in this way allowed me to plan a little more for the kids who needed extra support in terms of getting up to grade level on reading or enrichment (they had already read every single book I had on offer in a unit and were writing short stories at home for fun). I think a lot of teachers have had detracking journeys similar to mine. 

When that journey bubbles up to school policy — that’s when resistance can happen. Other teachers can be resistant, something I saw in my study, and if the school administration isn’t on board, forget it. Teachers need manageable class sizes so they can plan for and offer feedback to students who might be coming from a broader array of backgrounds with different interests and skills. Teachers also need training in the best practices of teaching kids with disparate interests and skills. 

Parental resistance can also be a significant barrier. It was something three of the four principals in my study grappled with constantly. They were all living in relatively progressive communities, however, so they felt like they could point-blank ask the parents of “highly” tracked kids if they thought it was right to have racially-identifiable classes and not get a lot of pushback. The fourth principal took the smallest step on the detracking rung (getting rid of the “lowest” track) and included parents in the planning process for this, and he reported facing no pushback at all.  

Something that surprised two of my principals, however, was the initial pushback they received from some families whose students had typically been in “lower” level classes. They were concerned that their students would not have the support they needed. I think this can be a very valid concern, which is why administrators have to work with parents and also provide those smaller class sizes I mentioned.

Also, historically, desegregation efforts have asked more of Black and Brown families than white families, so I think it’s right for educators to really work with those families when designing detracking programs. Most educators are white, and many really lack the culturally responsive tools to be able to have these difficult conversations.    

You were a teacher, and you spent a lot of time talking with teachers and administrators for this project — and outlining the ways in which they can both encourage students as they “de-track” but also function as gatekeepers for more advanced offerings. What dynamics are at play, and how can the system address them? 

I do think teachers play a big role in this work. I was lucky to have a mentor who was much farther along her own detracking journey to guide me to resources and research to start the work of “leveling up” my own classroom. At that time, our school also had a system where teachers would recommend students for their next class and that basically set the bar for where a student could enroll. Students would have to seek permission to enroll in a different class, and this permission involved a fair amount of paperwork and meetings.

This process is really common throughout the US — and it is also exceptionally problematic. It means that kids with high enough self-esteem and parents who were adept at navigating school could easily get into their chosen level, but everyone else was stuck with what a teacher suggested, even if that teacher had biases (which we know all humans do!) I argue that we need to move away from a system with a single defining factor influencing students’ opportunities. I also think the role of school counselors is really understudied as they are the ones often pressing the final button on a student's course selections. 

I’d love to hear you talk through the story of Johnson High School, which is now more than twenty years into its detracking process. What can other schools learn from them? What work do they still need to do? 

Johnson High School (n.b. all school names in the book are pseudonyms) is an incredible success story of how detracking can work when an entire school district — teachers, administrators, families, school board members, and other community members — go all in on believing that all students deserve access to the most interesting material schools have to offer.

They initially began by opening up their International Baccalaureate program in 11th and 12th grades, but soon realized students would need a lot more support before the age of 16 to thrive in that program. They then started a pre-IB program that included most students at the school, and that helped with success in the IB program. They also identified a need to push enrichment down into the younger grades, so now even the elementary schools in the district focus on leveling up and getting kids ready for the critical thinking work that is a hallmark of IB.

Throughout their journey, the district has maintained a separate life skills program for students with severe disabilities. They’ve also created a small track that doesn’t include IB for students who don’t need the life skills program but don’t feel prepared for the IB program. I think that balancing act between figuring out how best to support kids with disabilities in the wider program or in the two smaller programs has been really hard for them and is still not something they’ve totally figured out. But the vast majority of kids there are in pre-IB through tenth grade, have to take at least one IB class in 11th and 12th grade, and then are co-seated with IB classes if they opt-out of the program. The district is relatively racially and socioeconomically diverse (and I don’t mean that as code for a lot of kids of color and poor kids; they do have a mix greater than the typical U.S. high school). I think they show that this work can be done and done well with the appropriate support. 

One research project can only do so much, and I understand the difficulties in interviewing students who aren’t yet 18, but I found myself really hungry to hear from students about their experiences in these schools. If you could do a book that was just talking with students — both while they’re in classes, but also in the years afterwards — what would you ask? 

Oh my gosh, I have so many questions for students! I wasn’t able to get approval from the school districts I was working with or my own institution to include students in this study.If I could in the future, I’d really like to talk to the kids who had been in “lower” level classes and now had more opportunities. There is a lot of work demonstrating that teachers of color tend to be assigned to “lower” level classes and also that students of color in “higher” level classes often feel ostracized or made to speak for their entire racial group. Would detracking help to alleviate some of those feelings in places where more students of color ended up in advanced classes? Were they noticing they had more white teachers than before? And, if so, how was that affecting them? 

I think it’s also important to talk to the kids who had been in these upper-level classes before, too, to hear about their experiences, and also because I think these kids are under an increasing amount of pressure to go to the right college and collect as many accolades as possible along the way. One hope I have for well-designed detracking programs is that they can help alleviate some of that pressure if the baseline for most students is similar: A creative and challenging curriculum designed to prepare them for college or some other post-secondary work. 

Final question, and a tough one: If someone is resistant to or challenged by the idea of detracking…..what would you ask them to spend some more time thinking about? 

What ultimately led me to supporting detracking as a teacher at my own school was the realization that my “honors” level classes were already detracked. There were tons of kids in those classes who were not interested in English, barely did their homework, and so very obviously did not do any sort of reading outside of class. Those kids got to be in honors because their parents pushed them into it, because they figured out how to do the bare minimum of work to get an A, and/or because they were good at taking standardized tests. I was already having to differentiate my instruction and offer options for reading and writing assignments to try to draw in kids who either weren’t strong readers and writers or plainly weren’t interested. The difference, of course, is that most of those kids were white with fairly wealthy parents. So, I would ask folks resistant to the idea of detracking to think about why those kids are afforded the opportunities of honors classes but other kids–largely Black and/or Hispanic and/or poor–shouldn’t be. 

I’m a parent, too, and I also think a lot about the pressure upper-middle class white kids are under to “succeed” in the really narrow parameters we’ve set for them. I worry more about my son experiencing this pressure than I do about his not going to a “good” college because we’re seeing a lot of mental health issues in kids that may be linked to this pressure to perform, and I also think there are many paths to a fulfilling adulthood. So, I would also ask those resistant to detracking to think about why we’re allowing this scarcity mindset to take hold.

A lot of that mindset comes back to the precarious nature of the middle class right now in the United States. Parents have good reason to worry that their kids won’t do as well as they have, but I think our energy is better directed toward advocating for policies that open up and solidify the middle class rather than trying to keep some kids out. ●

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Margaret Thornton is an assistant professor of educational leadership and research at Rowan University’s College of Education. You can find more about her work here and find her book (with academic library pricing still in effect) here.