Educere

A Defense of Tracking, Part 2

This is the second part of a two-part essay. If you haven’t read the first part, The Parable of the Talents, you can find it here.

The verb “to educate” derives from the Latin verb “educere” (pronounced ay-DUKE-eh-ray), which means “to draw or lead out.” This derivation points us to a central conflict in theories about education: Are children blank slates, or do they have innate and unique interests and capacities? Or, in the words of Alison Gopnik, a professor of child psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, are parents and teachers carpenters or gardeners? The carpenter believes that children “can be molded,” while the gardener “provides a protected place to explore,” so that children can develop into the best version of the person they already are. It should be obvious from how I have framed this conflict that I am Team Gardener; I believe that education ought to draw out the talents children innately possess, which is why I favor academic tracking.

I took this photo in an Alpine wildflower garden above Schynige Platte in Switzerland. I love the contrast between the bold yellow gentian and the more dainty blossoms.

Obligatory Disclaimer

Education reformers do have good reasons to be suspicious of tracking as it has been practiced in the past. I believe that reformers act in good faith when they eliminate tracking; they want to improve education for all children.

• Tracking in our country has an ugly history of aligning with economic and race privilege rather than with academic talent. In the past, only the elite had access to the best teachers and most challenging classes.

• Tracking can make kids who aren’t in the advanced track feel bad about themselves. Matt Groening, in his pre-Simpsons days, joked about how kids in his school were divided into the “gold, silver, and brown groups,” for example.

• Tracking, if combined with an unjust economic system, could prevent kids from leading comfortable lives after school. If the only way to get a job with a living wage is to have a college degree, schools will feel it is their duty to make all children take college-prep courses.

• Tracking has had an unfortunate tendency to siphon off the strongest students for the best teachers, leaving struggling students with less-skilled teachers.

• Tracking violates our entrenched belief that any of us can do anything if we just set our minds to it—and our entrenched fear of being pushed into a particular role against our will. Think of the dystopias that American kids read, such as Brave New World, Divergent, The Giver, or The Hunger Games, all of which dramatize the evils of being forced into a particular path by a malevolent authority.

And yet all of these problems with tracking could be solved through policy changes. We could use more objective measures than pushy elite parents to allocate spots in advanced classes, for example. We could honor those life paths that are not academic—and ensure that nonacademic careers pay a living wage.¹ We could mandate that teachers be rotated through all the classes, so that every child has the chance to learn from the best teachers. And we could admit to ourselves that our beliefs and fears about tracking are misguided. We need hard work to succeed at a particular task, to be sure, but we also need interest and talent. Even when we prevent academically gifted kids from taking courses that are appropriate to their abilities, or require all kids to take identical courses regardless of ability, we don’t eradicate inequality. All we do is impose a lot of boredom on one side, insecurity on the other, and frustration all around.

Case Study: My Public Schools

I am old enough to have gone to school when tracking was still the norm. In grades 7 through 9, students could take any or all of several “enriched” courses (“enriched” is a more neutral and accurate term than “honors” in my opinion). Placements were done by teacher evaluation, not by parental pressure, and it was possible for students who did well in the standard classes to join the enriched classes the next year. The same teachers taught the enriched and the standard classes, so the schools didn’t relegate the struggling students to the worst teachers.²

In grades 10 through 12, we were assigned to either honors or standard English (again taught by the same teachers) based on prior performance and teacher recommendations. Students were allowed to choose a variety of math and science courses to fulfill state requirements. Only a small percentage of students chose the most rigorous courses; everyone else was able to take classes that were interesting and useful to them. Many of my friends took as their only math two trimesters of Consumer Math, which taught about personal finance, taxes, and compound interest. (I think all high school students should take Consumer Math!) A large percentage of students left campus in the afternoons to attend classes at the local vocational school, and others worked part-time jobs. These students freely chose these options and apparently preferred to spend their afternoons that way, rather than in academic classes.

The only required classes that weren’t tracked were social studies. I spent a fair amount of time in social studies lurking in the back row reading Plato’s Republic and Gödel, Escher, Bach (yes, I was a bit of a twit in high school). Some teachers, aware that I had mastered the class material, granted me blanket permission to leave class and go practice piano instead. One teacher, Ms. N—whose spiritual heirs are those PowerPoint presenters who just read each slide out loud—forced us all to go at one, laborious, pace. She put her lecture notes on overhead transparencies and would uncover a single sentence at a time using an exquisite system of sliding opaque papers. She would read each sentence aloud to us and then stand there while we copied it into our notebooks. For every lecture. For the life of me I can’t remember what Ms. N’s class was even about, and still less anything she taught us.

Case Study: Switzerland

Readers may not be aware that our reluctance to track students is the exception, and that tracking is in fact the normal way education is done in nearly every other developed country. In Europe, for example, the age at which students are tracked varies from age nine in Germany to age sixteen in Finland, but no European country requires that all students learn the same curriculum through their entire school career.

The Swiss system, with which I am most familiar, begins to track students in sixth grade. Using a combination of test scores, teacher recommendations, and (in some cases) parental input, schools place students into either an academic or a vocational track. These placements aren’t carved in stone; students are evaluated every year, and highly able students can move over to the academic track, while struggling students may change to the vocational track. At the high school level, tracking occurs not within but between schools: The small percentage of students headed for universities attend Gymnasiums (the equivalent of IB programs or Stuyvesant- or Thomas Jefferson–type public schools). The majority of students attend schools that will lead to apprenticeships for a wide variety of jobs, not only in the trades but also in service jobs, administration, physical therapy, nursing, financial advising, and similar careers. Once in their apprenticeships, students take courses and get practical work experience, and a good job awaits them when they graduate. Readers who are interested in more details will find this article helpful.

The system works because Switzerland respects—and adequately compensates—all workers. (Switzerland has no federal minimum wage, but about half of the cantons have set a minimum wage above $20 per hour, and Swiss salaries are among the highest in the world.) Students are able to choose career paths that best fit their interests and talents, and everyone receives an excellent, appropriate, and low-cost education.³

You Can’t Have That Wish, Little Bear

When my kids were little, a favorite book was Little Bear. Little Bear repeatedly wishes for outrageous things, and each time his mother gently says, “You can’t have that wish, Little Bear,” an expression that our family now uses any time someone is wishing for something that would be nice but is unfortunately impossible.

From Little Bear, written by Else Homelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

American education reformers want to make life better in our country. I get that. They hope that if we eliminate tracking and institute a Common Core curriculum, our people will be happier and our nation more just. But the evidence shows that their approach isn’t working. Since the imposition of the Common Core curriculum in 2010, and even before the disruptions of the pandemic, US PISA scores have remained flat—and abysmally low when compared with those from other developed countries. Our happiness ranking is middling at best (we were nineteenth last year), especially when taking into account that we are among the richest countries in the world. And speaking of being rich, the US has not shared the wealth; we rank below most other developed countries on the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality.

I took this map from the Wikipedia page on the Gini coefficient, here.

I’ll just note for the record that all the countries that beat us on the PISA and on the happiness and Gini rankings have academic tracking. It is true that correlation doesn’t equal causation, and that academic tracking is not necessarily a cause of these countries’ success—but tracking is apparently not holding them back either, nor is eliminating tracking helping us. These other countries offer their citizens many other benefits (chief among them a robust social safety net) that lead to their success. Improving life outcomes for disadvantaged kids is an extraordinarily difficult problem, and we can’t just wish it away by removing advanced classes for academically talented kids and by pushing everyone into a single academic path.

Some Blunt Talk

I was one of very few students in my high school whose parents had gone to college, let alone graduate school. Only about a dozen students out of my graduating class of 650 went to selective colleges, and more graduates enlisted in the military than went to college. Based on my experience—and in spite of claims from the experts that if we get rid of tracking, the stronger students will buoy everyone up—the less-academic students in my social studies classes didn’t enjoy the classes any more than I did, and they certainly weren’t interested in having me help them learn the material.⁴

One problem with US educational policy is that the people making decisions didn’t attend public schools like mine. They tend to come from elite educational backgrounds and the professional managerial class, and very few of them have direct personal experience with people who are bad at and don’t like school. Moreover, education reformers are a self-selected group of people who are particularly talented at learning—why else would they have pursued PhDs and academic careers? Or they are geniuses like Bill Gates. Of course education reformers believe that all students will be like they were and will succeed at school, if we just have high expectations and do this new and fashionable intervention (whatever it may be this time). Of course they assume that if academically talented students are denied classes that challenge them in school, they will just go off and learn on their own—or their parents will supplement their educations privately—because that’s how it was for them.

A Thought Experiment

For readers who are still reluctant to acknowledge that we have different aptitudes—and who still think that any child can learn any topic if they just have sufficient grit plus rock-star teachers—here’s a thought experiment: Is this true of you? If your boss required you to spend your work hours completing algebra 2 problem sets, studying chemistry and physics, learning a foreign language, and writing analytical essays on historical texts or The Scarlet Letter, would you be able to succeed at everything if you just tried really hard? Maybe, but more likely not. Plus you’d probably resent your boss and think he was wasting your time on irrelevancies. Or, conversely, think of your special expertise and talent—of something you’re good at enjoy, and with which you can make a real contribution. Now imagine that your boss won’t allow you to do the work you do best, and instead makes you perform boring, low-level tasks because she says it’s more fair that way.⁵ You would resent her and think she was wasting your talents on irrelevancies.

Schoolchildren are like us; they have diverse interests and talents too. Besides, why would we even want everyone to be the same? We ought instead to recognize and feel gratitude for the diverse talents every human being can offer the world, we ought to nurture those diverse talents though academic tracking,⁶ and we ought to ensure that all workers are able to lead secure and comfortable lives. And I believe that if we educate children appropriately and vote for leaders who will make the economy more just for everyone, then we can have that wish, Little Bear.

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How about you, readers? Was there tracking in your or your kids’ schools? What is your opinion on tracking? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

This is one of my favorite cartoons. Poor Norman! He looks so miffed!

1. On this topic I highly recommend Fredrik deBoer’s excellent book, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Educational System Perpetuates Social Injustice.

2. In fact, for eighth-grade social studies the enriched classes got the worst teacher in the school. There is no force on earth more chaotic than highly obedient, people-pleasing children when once unleashed by a teacher who can’t control her class. Our class was the better-behaved one and only played bumper cars with our desks. The rowdy class had food fights and did trust falls off the filing cabinet.

3. Americans often ask why we don’t have cheap college like they have in Europe. One reason is that in Europe only the small percentage of students who have extremely strong academic qualifications attend university.

4. I did have one wonderful social studies teacher, Mr. T, who offered special challenges for students who wanted to learn more. In order to earn a B, we had to score 100 percent on a quiz about our elected officials. In order to earn an A, we also had to read Powerline, a book about a local controversy, and take an essay exam on it. Only a handful of students bothered to take the quiz, and only three of us read the book and took the exam. I loved Mr. T and his class, but—and this flies in the face of claims by education reformers that all students will rise to our expectations for them—most of the students in Mr. T’s class didn’t avail themselves of the opportunities he offered for more learning and enrichment.

5. I recognize that this thought experiment is a reality for far too many workers. On this topic I highly recommend David Graeber’s excellent book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

6. Here’s an example of a talent that my teachers cultivated. Compare footnotes 1 and 5: Notice that there is a comma following “book” in footnote 1 but no comma following “book” in footnote 5. That’s because deBoer has written one book (so far), so the clause with his book title is nonrestrictive and thus requires a comma. Graeber, on the other hand, has written several books, so the clause with his book title is restrictive and thus shouldn’t have a comma. In addition, there is one en-dash in this article. Can you find it, and do you know the rules for its proper use?

Wouldn’t it be silly to make all kids learn minutia like this, when we could delegate the task to people like me, who have a talent for remembering and applying punctuation rules?