Reply to S/O High SES students will perform well no matter their peer group

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Reply to "S/O High SES students will perform well no matter their peer group"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
My parents immigrated here when I was 4 with nothing and we were sponsored by a church. I knew no English when I started K and went to ESL classes in school for 2-3 years.  Thanks to tracking I did well in school and have a post graduate degree.  You can’t make all poor kids do better or well without tracking, but you can give the kids who are smarter or higher performing a better chance to succeed like myself with tracking.[/quote]

That's great that the system worked well for you.  Are you by any chance white or Asian?

I ask because in the South, where I grew up in the 70s, tracking was often used as a tool for enforcing segregation in theoretically desegregated schools.  There were no tests, but white kids were almost all "high achieving", whereas Black kids were on-level or special ed.  It felt to me like the system was working (I'm reasonably bright, and I was in gifted classes), but I think the system always feels like it's working to the people who it's designed to work for.  I think the bright black kids in my area had a different opinion.  In fact, one of those kids went on to write a book about how as a child he was placed in special ed classes without ever having been administered any testing whatsoever.  That was before he grew up, earned a PhD, and became tenured faculty at an Ivy.[/quote]

An alternative way of looking at it is that even in the present, when testing is applied as a gateway to tracking, you're seeing the exact same results.  This is why New York City Public Schools is considering doing away with its "gifted" program.  That is, the results display a bias that tracks closely to race.  But the reasons for that are complex, moreso than your simplistic conclusion based on one person's personal experience from the 1970s.[/quote]

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