Keeping Track

Even in an applied field such as curriculum studies, it is rare for an academic book to attract and influence a broad spectrum of policy makers, practitioners, and everyday people. Jeannie Oakes's Keeping Track is an exception. The book, first published in 1985, draws upon the results of a large national study to describe the effects of grouping, or tracking, students by perceived ability. Although it was not the first scholarly critique of tracking, its combination of accessible writing and compelling evidence helped spark national debate about a practice that had become pervasive in U.S. schools. A second edition issued in 2005 contains a new preface plus two additional chapters that analyze this debate and the detracking movement it spawned.

Oakes opens her book by defining tracking as a subjective process by which students are sorted into high- and low-level courses that offer very different educational opportunities. She then summarizes the misconceptions that she believes underlie this practice: that students learn more in homogeneous groups, that tracking protects the self-esteem of “slower” students, that track placements are appropriate and fair, and that teaching is harder in heterogeneous classes. In the following chapter, she traces tracking's historical roots to the early 20th century when immigration fueled unprecedented increases in secondary school enrollment. Tracking was grounded in racist, classist, and paternalistic beliefs about these immigrants and others. The practice was embraced as an efficient scientific method to provide this newly heterogeneous student body with schooling appropriate to everyone's academic capacity and future station in life.

The six chapters that comprise the heart of the book describe tracking-related findings from A Study of Schooling, led by John Goodlad. This massive 1970s study involved 25 geographically and demographically diverse secondary schools, 297 classrooms, and hundreds of hours and observations and interviews. (The same study was the subject of Goodlad's classic book, A Place Called School.) The results, as described by Oakes, are a damning indictment of tracking. Low-track students do not just move slower, they learn less. Their inferior curriculum consists largely of learning and relearning basic skills. Teachers are tracked too, with the best instructors reserved for the higher tracks. Low-track teachers are more punitive and spend more time on discipline. In turn, low-track students develop negative attitudes and behaviors. They argue, act up, and perceive their teachers and peers as unfriendly and unkind. By contrast, the students in the untracked classes included in the study absorbed rigorous material in a supportive environment indistinguishable from what was found in higher tracks.

Oakes accordingly fails to find tracking to be equitable or fair because students who need the most are getting less. And decisions about who gets what are tainted by subjective judgments that disadvantage low-income students of color. Oakes raises constitutional questions about the degree to which tracking violates students' rights to due [Page 512]process and equal protection under the law. Drawing upon the reproductionist theory of Samuel Bowles and Hebert Gintis, she concludes that tracking legitimizes inequality by providing an illusion of meritocracy. She concludes by recommending that schools eliminate tracking.

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