Tracking is a divisive practice within the world of education, with policy makers on both sides either heralding it as a practice that benefits everyone on all tracks by providing and individualized approach to teaching, and others saying it only benefits those in the higher tracks by providing these high tracks with the best quality of teachers, creating large gaps of knowledge. When lower and higher tracks drift farther apart from each other, this causes the achievement gap to increase between white students and black students. The basic concept of tracking involves grouping students based off of reading levels, teacher recommendations, test scores, and previous schooling results. Tracking can happen anytime between kindergarten all the way up to 9th grade. Typically, students stay within their track for the entirety of their schooling. Exceptions to this are rare, except if the students parent’s are very involved with their child’s schooling. Many factors can lead to this happening, but access to quality preschool education could be the leading factor as to why black students get placed in lower tracks. According to the graph, percentage wise, white and black students are equally enrolled in K-12 schools, black students have significantly less representation in higher level math tracks
Source: NIEER
Preschool Access and Quality
According to research, black children are attending preschool at a higher percentage than white children. This doesn’t show all the facts. Even though preschool is a great way to get your child placed on the advanced tracks in kindergarten, it all depends on the quality of the preschool. This is where blacks are at a disadvantage, because they don’t have the same access to quality preschool like white families do. The graph below perfectly represents the access to quality childcare. It shows that only 25% of the center based child care that black families receive is high quality, compared to the 36% for white families. The disparity becomes even worse when you examine the home based care. For black families 0% of their home based care in considered to be high quality, compared to the 15% for white families. By not having access to high quality child care, black students are at higher risk to be placed in lower tracks, where they will likely be for the rest of their time in school. Even within these preschools, students can already be divided into groups based upon their skin color. Implicit bias from the teachers can play a large role in this. According to a recent study from Yale, all teacher, both black and white, watch black children more often because they are expecting trouble. By doing this, these teachers are reinforcing these groupings of students, even if they only have the skin color of these students to base their judgements upon them.
By: Justin Alvino