The War on Excellence
In the 1990s, the Chicago public school system embarked
on an experiment in “detracking” reform, wherein it eliminated advanced math
courses in high schools. The schools took an honors-for-all approach, making
all students, regardless of aptitude or ability, take algebra or higher-level
math beginning in ninth grade and eliminating remedial math courses.
The stated goal of detracking was to encourage more
students to take challenging math courses and boost the number of graduates who
went on to college.
As a 2014 report in
EdWeek summarized, the experiment was a failure. All of the students suffered:
In
the wake of that policy change, low-achieving students were more likely to fail
9th grade math and, eventually, less likely to graduate from high school. They
were no more likely to attend college. In the meantime, higher-achieving
students’ test scores declined, in part, the researchers suggested, because
struggling and unsupported lower-achieving peers were slowing down the class.
The high achievers were also less likely to go on to take advanced math, which
may have helped explain why they were also less likely to attend college.
In other words, detracking didn’t help the students it
was intended to help and harmed the students who had previously done well with
tracking.
Educational policymakers offered many explanations for
the failure, including that teachers weren’t properly trained to deal with the
mix of students in their classrooms and didn’t receive enough professional
development support. When Chicago reintroduced some elements of tracking,
however, including advanced classes for high-performing students and more
intensive remedial classes for poorly performing students, all students
improved.
“People often think that grouping low-achieving students
together is detrimental,” Takako Nomi, an assistant professor of education at
St. Louis University in Missouri, said at the time. But in fact, even among the
lower-performing students, “scores actually improved despite declines in peer
ability” in their tracked classes.
And yet, tracking continued to spark controversy. In
2014, Obama’s Department of Education made tracking an explicitly racial issue
when its Office for Civil Rights targeted a New Jersey school district’s
tracking program, claiming that it had too few black students in its advanced
classes. As The Atlantic noted at
the time, “The education department and advocates have said tracking
perpetuates a modern system of segregation that favors white students and keeps
students of color, many of them black, from long-term equal achievement.”
Ultimately, the school district had to enter a resolution
agreement with the Department of Education that required them to hire a
consultant to “come up with a plan to increase equity.” Other school districts
that wanted to keep tracking programs, such as California’s Elk Grove school
district, were required to make the students in the advanced program match the
racial makeup of the school district.
The Obama administration’s approach rested heavily on
many assumptions about race and performance, many of them consistent with
Critical Race Theory’s emphasis on equality of outcome. The use of Critical
Race Theory as a lens for understanding educational outcomes has only increased
since then, both in volume and hyperbole. A typical CRT argument in the journal Educational
Considerations recently posited that any racial disparities in
advanced classes are evidence of racism. As one academic argued, citing the
work of Derrick Bell, tracking is itself a form of segregation akin to the
segregation outlawed by Brown v. Board of
Education: “Legal decisions such as Brown v. Board of
Education (1954) provide an illusion of racial equality, other
structures such as tracking remain in place to maintain the entrenchment of
racial segregation and inequality.”
All of which should be understood as context for the
revivified debates over tracking and advanced classes in public schools. As
the New York Post reported this
week, a furor erupted among parents when the Lab Middle School in New York
announced that it was planning to eliminate its advanced math courses. This
comes after New York announced earlier in the year that it planned to eliminate
“gifted and talented” tests for entry to public schools in the city, one of the
recommendations of Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group, which
previously called for
the dissolution of all tracking for advanced students in New York public
schools in the name of “equity.”
In Boston, the School Committee “voted to scrap the
traditional admissions exam for a system that allocated seats based on a
student’s grades and ZIP code, which members thought would give priority to
students in lower-income communities.” When parents objected,
school committee member Lorna Rivera texted that she was “sick of Westie
whites” who were complaining about the admissions change. “Whatever. They’re
delusional,” fellow committee member Alexandra Oliver-Davila texted back. Both
were forced to resign. Another committee member, Michael Loconto, also resigned
after he was “caught on a hot mic before the meeting mocking the names of Asian
parents who signed up to speak.”
None of this evidence of racial animus toward white and
Asian students changed the Boston Public Schools system’s approach. A spokesman
said the school system will “continue our work with our stakeholders as we
dismantle systemic barriers to opportunity and open up access for our
students.”
As Noah Smith of Bloomberg noted of
the New York City changes, “Killing advanced classes does nothing to improve
broad-based math education, or to foster the skills necessary to have a broad,
highly competent technical workforce—which is what we need if we’re going to
keep our high-tech industries.”
He added, “Simply refusing to teach well-prepared kids
advanced math will NOT result in less-well-prepared kids learning math more
effectively. Math learning is not some kind of resource in fixed supply.”
He’s right, as decades of evidence demonstrates. Yet
equity advocates continue to insist that schools are denying opportunities to
kids not based on their ability and willingness to work hard, but because of
“structural racism.” This allows them to overlook many inconvenient facts. In
the Chicago de-tracking experiment, for example, it wasn’t innate ability that
determined student success, but motivation and behavior: The study found that
“students misbehaved more” in the remedial level classes and “were more likely
to be suspended or receive disciplinary infractions,” which made it more
challenging for teachers to teach them.
Are tracking efforts and advanced classes and “gifted and
talented” programs in need of reform and improvement? Of course. Schools should
constantly reevaluate whether these programs serve their student populations.
The question is whether those reforms will be driven by practical realities
based on evidence or merely by conformity to ideological demands.
Smith argues
that the “excellence vs. equity” approach to the tracking debate misses a
larger point: The U.S. needs to improve its STEM education overall, and the way
to do that is to focus on fostering habits and motivation among all students
interested in these areas of study. Smith is surely correct, but he
underestimates how determined CRT-inspired “equity” advocates are to eliminate
any mechanisms for measuring ability as a signal of their larger ideological
commitment; they aren’t eliminating advanced classes so the U.S. will be more
competitive with China in the future.
Making advanced classes and tracking all about race
simplifies things. According to the CRT formula, any racial disparity is
evidence of racism, hence it must be abolished or reconfigured to suit the
desired outcome. This allows equity advocates to avoid the real challenge that
the lack of representation by black and Hispanic students in advanced math
courses reveals: These students did not receive decent math education and support
beginning in elementary school and have fallen behind their peers who did.
That is a failure of our public schools. It should be
tackled not by punishing other students down the road but by improving the
quality of education for all in the early years. The CRT approach also ignores
what will be the likely outcome of abolishing advanced courses: Students with
the means to leave will abandon public schools for private schools. Either that
or their families will pay for outside tutoring to ensure those students
perform at levels beyond their less well-off peers, intensifying rather than
alleviating broader inequities.
“Equity” advocates who want to abolish all tracking, all
selective public high schools, and all advanced courses in subjects like math
aren’t interested in thoughtful reform. They demand revolution. If you believe,
as equity advocates do, that acknowledging disparities in ability or interest
is a gateway to returning to last century’s malign racial segregation in
schools, abolition of such standards is the only path forward—and gutting
advanced courses and tracking are viewed as a necessary casualty in that larger
war.