Tracking: Why Schools Need to Take Another Route - OAKES

OVERVIEW:

I fully enjoyed this article. It brought up a lot of great point about tracking in school. It allowed me to see both sides of the issue, and the positives and negatives about each. I do believe that changes should be made to the tracking system in order for equality for all students.

“Moreover, the nature of these differences suggests that students who are placed in high-ability group gave access to far richer schooling experiences than other students. This finding helps explain, at least in part, why it is that tracking sometimes seems to “work” for high-ability students and not for others.”

This is unfair for low-ability students for obvious reasons. If classes are divided by learning ability there should not be discrimination of classes getting less money and fewer amounts of the best teachers. It is wrong. All different learning classes should be equally divided with materials and concepts they must learn.

“In low-ability classes, for example, teachers seem to be less encouraging and more punitive, placing more emphasis on discipline and behavior and less on academic learning.”  

This is something that I have personal witnessed at my tutoring. While I am in the classroom as a whole, the less-ability students are more focus to the lesson. But when it is time to break up and the less-able students going into another classroom the aid teacher and myself the students become more rowdy.  It is harder to keep the students focus and I find that a lot of the time is wasted to keep reminding them to stay on task.

“For teachers, evaluations might involve more private, individual questions, such as, “What did she learn?” rather than “How did she compare with others?””

In schools I feel like it is competitive between students. Scores and grades are everything. They determine how much you really know and understand. But to be compared to other students is unfair because everyone learn at different rates and are stronger in one subjects than others. I do like this idea that Oakes suggests to compare scores to the individual student alone, and focus on what they learned. I believe it is a more positive way of evaluating students.