Tracking in U.S. Schools

Tracking is the sorting and grouping of students on the basis of perceived ability. This entry first describes the origins of tracking and its use in today's schools. It then presents the problems with tracking, including unjust assignment practices and inequitable access to quality curricula. The entry considers the debate on whether problems with tracking can be fixed, and concludes with a look at research on the achievement effects of tracking versus detracking.

In the United States, tracking was instituted during the early 1900s as administrators sought to address what they perceived as divergent needs of the exploding school population brought on by urban industrialization, immigration, and the enforcement of compulsory education. Some prominent educators assumed that some students were not college bound and that both these students and society generally would benefit from their receiving vocational training. Other advocates of tracking had less pure educational goals in mind—a two-tiered system of tracking would separate the undesirable, immigrant, low-income students from their wealthier, Anglo-Saxon peers. Tracking thus took hold in a climate where a belief in efficiency through specialization converged with prejudice against less privileged immigrants. While tracking as implemented today has changed from these overarching vocational or college-bound programs to the separation of students into different levels of classes by subject area, questions about the purpose of education and prejudice toward less privileged students remain.

The debate about tracking still shows up routinely in public discourse about educational reform. Parents encounter the debate as they learn whether their schools pull out “gifted” students for special programming, or whether their children's teachers use hierarchical reading groups. In the controversial and widely viewed 2010 film Waiting for Superman, one of the five featured students enters the lottery for a detracked charter school as an alternative to her local, tracked high school. Detracking is a reform in which all students take the same, single-track, college-bound sequence of courses in heterogeneous classrooms, regardless of prior educational preparation and skill level.

Though intended to allow tailoring of instruction to specific “ability” groups, tracking has many problems. All researchers on tracking, no matter what side of the debate they are on, agree that tracking, as practiced currently, has problems that should be addressed by educators in order to ensure educational equality for all students.