Educational Tracking

This sort of thing is sort of even done, or was even sort of by my time already, in elementary school.

I'm afraid Dave Q could've phrased this far more provocatively, but let's see what he say anyway.

The problem is in England a course like 'general math' wouldn't be seen as for someone who probably won't go to college. The system isn't quite as rounded here (although looking like becoming increasingly so) which is a good thing. It allows you to be very good at something and then completely let go on everything else. Tracking according to academic ability does occur subject by subject, however, and is also porbably a good thing, apart from when the wrong decision is made - could easily affect confidence etc.

JOSH GET OUTA THAT IVORY TOWAH! YOU CAN DO IT!!!!

when they want to split themselves? it's good to offer harder classes in high school, maybe in middle school, but i do think they should sign up for them instead of being shunted in by teachers (as in my experience the teachers pick wrong).

Ha, I didn't take comp. or trig., josh. I shouldn't be going to college at all right now!

sadly my experience has told me that neither is really 'required'.

dave q to thread

Where I went to school the streaming was pretty extreme - by the age of 12 everything was pretty much determined where you'd end up. This didn't ratchet up the pressure though - on the contrary, most people just followed whatever path their family's expectations took and the great majority of the 'vocational' stream dropped out shortly after anyway. (Read 'family expectations' = whatever you imagine the specific class/culture/whatever nexus relevant to the situation to be) This may be area-specific though. If you're the sort of person who believes strongly in education as an equalising force then this should be profoundly, crushingly depressing. (Constant readers probably realise social justice ranks somehwat low on my list of priorities, so when even I claim a system = de facto apartheid then there must be something wrong with it, eh? Not to mention that in my own case, I'm speaking of a system in the most self-consciously PC country in the universe) And of course, the fact that I breezed into the post-secondary-bound stream like it was almost automatic imbued me with the feeling that I could party with all the burnouts because I WASN'T ACTUALLY GOING TO END UP LIKE THEM so I didn't need to worry about them or even think about them as people, dig? See, when one of THEM doesn't show up, it's "We gave you a chance, thicko, but you're obviously not worth it". When I showed up drunk as usual it was, "There must be something greatly not to your liking about this system, can we offer you resources to restore you to academic greatness? It can't be a lack of intelligence because it SEZ RIGHT HERE YOU'RE IN THE 'ACADEMIC' CATEGORY'." See the circular reasoning that results from this kind of labelling? It's the form of logic most people rely on when it comes to decisions that DON'T AFFECT THEM MUCH because it's the easiest. But see, I'm not complaining about that, because in the end I did OK out of it. As for those other people, well who knows? And the fact that I am so ignorant about the people who were streamed off elsewhere that I need only resort to the luxury of abstracting them as part of a theory when I need think of them AT ALL (and going on an internet board during work doesn't count as 'need') says alot about the effects of 'streaming' also. (Believe me, I am actually aware of that fact)

(When I speak of being 'drunk as usual', it's in the 'those days were fun' sense, not the 'I was a lonely teenage goth' sense. I mean, goddamn we knew how to party! Like that. 'Cept I wasn't penalised for it by being made to work in Pizza Hut forevermore)

(N. America 'classlessness' = 'everybody on the same level as us OR HIGHER is equal'['us' = whoever is speaking])

(crucial to above formula - most people [the 'us'] think of themselves as being slightly 'higher-up' on the social level than they actually are, people evaluate their standing according to their POTENTIAL [i.e. 'unused', i.e. "I know I can do better because I'd hate to think my current shitty life is the best I can do", magical thinking] status as opposed to ACTUAL. As inequality widens this gets more and more extreme as for most this is the only way people have of not becoming suicidal, or at least bitter and dishonest.

If you're the sort of person who believes strongly in education as an equalising force then this should be profoundly, crushingly depressing.

Yes, it is. That pretty much sums it up for me.

dave q is OTM in other respects, I reluctantly admit. (Reluctant because of the correctness of the description of this particular issue -- not because I wanted dave q personally to be wrong.)

Age 12 seems too early to have one's future determined [i.e. society institutionally reinforces the school-tendencies one has at that age], but I really can't think of a reasoned method for determining the age at which academic culling should take place. I would have to say it took place at 12 or earlier for me, in that it was only because my mother raised holy hell when we moved to a new school distrtict that my new school started an alegbra class, which allowed me to be on college-prep math track when I got to high school. For those like dave q and me I suppose it worked to our individual benefit to have this tracking take place earlier rather than later, but if you take self-interest out of the equation (yeah, right) at what age do you think it can be justified?

One could argue that this "culling" de facto takes place at birth, most pointedly in areas where the local public schools offer simply no hope (e.g. inner cities), which I think is indefensible, but I can't think how to fix this. Lots of times it is the parents deciding how things will be for their kids in that they look to settle down in communities with good public schools, so the US has its system of landed aristocracy or whatever you want to call it.

/middle-class guilt

(Complicator - after a few years of this some educators realised there was SOMETHING WRONG with this system, so they had a brilliant solution as do all academics - REQUIRE the 'non-academics' to take at least one academic-type course as a requirement for graduation [the 'requirement' bit was presumably to overcome those factors which impede people's class mobility]. Well, the result of this was that certain ppl who could've stuck to Auto Mechanics and at least got that diploma were forced to take classes in languages and composition, and unfortunaely most of them stopped showing up or failed, so the poor fuckers didn't even get that bit of paper in the end. Things like this explain my oft-expressed bilious contempt for earnest do-gooders, which the Canadian education profession [and political classes] seem to grow in mass-production labs)

This has always struck me as a bit dumb of the US/Canadian school system - the fact that to leave school (with diploma), to -ahem- graduate you have to pretty much pass everything. Therefore to prevent loads of people not graduating the standard that needs to be obtained is pretty low. Not only this but what does the diploma / GPA actually tell a future employer about what you are good at? (Do they break down the course you took, which ones you were good at?)

I'm not saying GCSE's and A-Levels are goods gift but they do at least provide more information.

In our streamed English and Maths groups there was often quite heavy traffic between them at the end of the year. Operating such things oin a relegation/promotion model surely helps those like Wimbledon AFC unfairly placed in the wrong division to sort it out.

(Not saying that 'these poor fuckers' shouldn't have been in the 'smart class' - more like, after being told for the previous four years to stick to macrame, all of a sudden they were told to take classes they had no preparation whatever, and ended up not graduating. This is the reality behind the 'need for specialised skills inthe new economy', countless lives wasted because of bureaucratic meddling on the top, or misguided initiatives, or just the general shit you get when somebody wants to MAKE A DIFFERENCE but on a timetable corresponding to election year. I mean, these people have essentially been consigned to the scrapheap of life, but there weren't many of us in Gen X so the collateral damage fromthese failed experiments wasn't really enough to trouble anybody. See, I can blame ANY social ill on the MOTHERFUCKING BOOMERS)

the reactive quasi-political counter-weight to official streaming in the schoolroom is the phenom of vox-pop streaming in the hallway (where jocks CAN still beat up on nerds, and feel socially superior, for a little while) => a huge amt of pop/rock culture (inc.by extension ilx) drums out the dialectic of "ts: hallway vs schoolroom — FITE!" ("prog vs punk", "pop vs indie", "would-be hipsters vs faux populists"... all these can be mapped onto "hallway vs schoolroom" AND "schoolroom vs hallway")

this post brought to you courtesy Frank Kogan Intellectual Property Worldwide (kinda)

i guess the deep question is, is the "hallway counterweight" (another word for it: "the 60s") an emergent politics or a reactionary psychic shelter?

Re 60s - seeing what became of the counterculture, 'reactionary psychic cocooning' seems inevitable. translated to today's demographic its the parents who are doing the cocooning, and there's more of them who are also vocaller than before, usually about THEIR kid's right to do whatever he goddamn pleases

yeah sure but i also meant the "shelter" of being cool and hard in the schoolyard, where top-dog swagger now = hot-dog seller later

This is getting ever closer to Dave Marsh explaining why the MC5 were better than the Stooges!

(I actually have a bit of sympathy with his position - nobody speaks for the hot-dog sellers etc. except Bruce Springsteen etc. - but at least in Detroit if you'd quit school at 10 to hang out by a racetrack and smoke Luckies you could find a cool rock'n'roll band to kick out the jams with, whereas where I was from - nothing. Alcoholism or being a bus cleaner, that's it)

well naturally, DM invented punk!! the hot-dog sellers are the spectre haunting all of rock'n'roll

'hot-dog sellers are the spectre haunting all of rock'n'roll'

Oh, they're easy to find. They're the ones who shout "Free Bird" no matter who's playing, the door security who threatens to beat the shit out of the band for attempting to load their own gear, the cheerful cockney promoter ("Wot money? Everybody came to see the opening act now fack off"), and there goes all the solidarnosc I built up in the previous insightful posts

'Bye, solidarnosc -- come back soon!

"hallway counterweight" (another word for it: "the 60s") an emergent politics or a reactionary psychic shelter?

If I'm understanding the hallway counterweight correctly, I think it equivalent in this discussion is home schooling, and to answer your question perhaps a bit of both.<

In second grade, my accellerated English group got to go do the poetry unit with the fourth graders. Later on I had an opportunity to take college math classes but turned it down because of fear of looking like a big geek. If I'd only known...

The thing about the US public school system is that it's class- streaming by its very nature, even if there's no actual streaming going on -- at least in terms of difficulty-level "tracking," if not subject-matter "streaming." For instance, I grew up in a medium-sized city wherein a large number of "neighborhood" elementaries fed into a fair number of middle schools, which in turn fed into four large high schools: since US schools are funded largely by local property taxes, the relative wealth of the various neighborhood elementaries created differently-abled streams that, without too much variation, basically became the "official" tracks of the consolidated schools up the line. Property-tax school funding is basically the root of every single thing that is materially wrong with US class economics -- and unfortunately it ties in with the other sort of de facto class- streaming, which stems from the reality that the middle to upper classes have the time and resources to do all of those stimulating early child-development things that make for academically successful sprogs.

The class thing is unfortunate, because it only gives Americans further impetus to deal with intellectual tracking the same way we deal with class: identification, resentment, and the mistaken idea that these things are unchangeable and innate and identity-defining (though we still aspire toward wealth and like to think of ourselves as clever -- i.e. we want to have money or knowledge/intelligence but not alter our basic sense of class or learning). In fantasy-world a tracked system would ideally have the "lower" tracks plugging patiently along and striving to "achieve into" a "higher" one; in practice, given the sociology of American adolescents, this is intesely laughable. Ideally kids would also be quite well-adjusted about achieving well in certain areas and not in others, and tailoring these skill-sets into some sort of career-oriented track -- and often this happens quite decently -- but the introduction of a post-schooling career into the thinking brings you right back to rigid class associations that pretty well stifle the kids' ability to map out individual futures for themselves. This is stupid of basically everyone involved, including the kids.

The other issue that fascinates me is that while many many people complain about the effects of streaming, the fact is that it's done because everyone involved perceives it to satisfy their own interests: which is to say, you have two cadres of parents screaming "you are ignoring my child's needs" either because coursework is going over the kids' heads (making them restless and disengaged) or boring the kids with its mundanity (making them ditto). The ones most likely to be screwed over by it are the kids who could in fact go either way -- and thus it's the completely average kids, the ones at whose level the material would theoretically have been placed, who suddenly find themselves either suffering the remedial or being crushed by the advanced. And the immediate push there is for what: more tracking, further subdivision. It sometimes seems to me, though, that this is a positive thought process: after all, it's the person-defining hugeness of the tracks/streams that causes kids to mentally limit their images of themselves -- theoretically the more you can personalize instruction and personalize routes, the less you have this problem. Unfortunately "personal" = "expensive," so hahaha: wealth- stratification again.

(This is my worst and least coherent post ever isn't it?)

My school handles this fairly well, I think. We had accelerated art and math starting in fifth grade but by the time kids got to high school that didn't make much difference. We have a block scheduling system where you switch classes every semester instead of taking the same ones year-long, so if you weren't in accelerated math you simply take math both semesters and you're caught up to the accelerated kids who only took one math course during the year. Or if you were in accelerated but didn't feel challenged enough you could be taking calculus by sophomore year. Some courses were really boring because they were so watered down anyway, but if you had a good teacher they'd let you opt out of the unit and do some other sort of project.

The system works well because you can get to fairly high-level courses in every subject if you don't take electives, even if you didn't start out in the advanced classes, and if you don't want to be taking hard classes you can fill your schedule up with cooking. Also I know kids who've taken really hard courses in math and science and failed elementary language courses, so if there was a tracking system based on difficulty they wouldn't have been able to get so far in math. The problem is that the state board of regents keeps trying to "raise standards", changes the state exams required for graduation around every year without properly preparing the teachers, and then blames the schools when kids fail. I hate the board of regents!

I think what's screwed up is how early it typically happens. US society deems children under the ages of 16-21 (depending on the state and the area of adult whatever) too young to be able to form meaningful consent for important life-decisions, like voting, sex, entering into contract, drinking, crime, etc. yet it sets up a suystem that essentially allows children to sink or swim socially and academically in ways that have far more important ramifications than any of those legislatively-protected activitites.

Also, educational tracking introduces class structures to children at a formative age, not only in a concrete, social sense (you'll only know and socialize with your own "kind" except in P.E. class) but also wastes the opportunity to inculcate compassion, social responsibility, group welfare, and all those other socially progressive ideas that might be possible if classes were undifferentiated until the age of majority. (That is, if you had to deal with the total society you would develop be exposed to alternate ideas that would be useful in later life, e.g., naked self-interest does not always lead to the best results.)

Finally, although this discussion has been focusing on the negative effects on the lower end of the academic tracks, academic tracking can also harm the higher academically-tracked students by giving them a false sense of entitlement, failing to prepare them for real life post-school problems and generally turning them into miserable (in every sense) people. So I guess my proposal is keep them all together until an age consistent with society's other, arbitrary age-based laws, then give 'em enough rope.