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[quote=Anonymous]It helps a lot in understanding DCPS to know about its history.

Despite what you might have learned in history class, when Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down in 1956 the schools didn't suddenly become desegregated. Prior to Brown, &quot;separate but equal&quot; in DC was heavy on the separate and light on the equal -- there were two complete school systems, black and white, with two sets of facilities, two sets of teachers, two administrations and two superintendents -- two of everything. After Brown, the white system resisted integration with the black system with every bureaucratic trick it could muster. The next 25 years were a series of moves and counter-moves, where the administration would throw up a barrier, black parents and students would take the system to court and a court order would be issued prohibiting the barrier, then the administration would throw up a new barrier and the cycle would repeat.

One such barrier was implementation of strict boundary rules that made it impossible to attend a school out-of-boundary, and then boundaries drawn to follow racial lines. Our current out-of-boundary system and boundaries stem directly from a court order. Once it became impossible to keep blacks out of white schools, the white schools adopted tracking, which was rigged  to keep the black and white kids in separate classrooms. The case of Hobson vs. Hansen eliminated tracking in DC public schools. (In an interesting bit of DC trivia, the lead plaintiff was the son of Julius Hobson).

Without arguing the educational merits of tracking, it's important to know three things about it: 1. Its  history in DC; 2. The legal environment that remains from Hobson vs. Hansen; and 3. the achievement gap by race that persists. The reality of DC is that if you were to have tracking, the tracks would fall very, very sharply along racial lines.

While I personally believe that tracking is the best thing for all students, we're unlikely to see it in DC&gt;[/quote]

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