Literacy With An Attitude

Jeannie Oakes talks in her writing, "Tracking: Why Schools Need To Take Another Route" about the ways that tracking students is setting them up for failure. She compares it to keeping the rich, rich and keeping the poor, poor. Students are placed in classrooms based on their academic abilities. There are students placed in honors classes and students who are placed in remedial classes. By doing this, schools are giving better teachers and more opportunity to students who are considered honors. The students who just might be slower learners are placed in classrooms where they aren't given the same opportunity or education. They aren't forced to push themselves, and aren't nearly as encouraged as students who are honors. We've all see it growing up. I was a very average student, and as a result I don't feel like I was ever pushed to my full potential. That's what school is supposed to be all about. Students are supposed to feel like there are teachers who believe in them enough to push them and think than they can do better than even how well the student thinks that they can do. It's not fair that we have different students who are being pushed, and taught differently based on how they test. Every student has the same ability to succeed if they're given the right tools and education and I firmly believe that. I don't think it's fair the way that tracking students sets certain students on a pedestal and makes the students who aren't placed in these honors classes believe that they can't do it. Every student should have the same opportunity to succeed and it isn't something that should be taken away because schools are using the "tracking" method. Oakes discusses alternatives to tracking, and she says that in order to do so, "The most important and difficult task for those who would change tracking is to confront deeply held beliefs, such as the belief that academic ability is fixed very early and is largely unchangeable or that achievement differences can be largely accounted for by differences in ability." She's arguing that the idea that academic ability is fixed very early needs to be changed and I completely agree. If students are being tracked at early ages, and they remain in these same classes where they are placed for their entire academic career, that's not fair. Students change as does their academic ability, and students who are placed in remedial classes might be a lot more successful if they were just pushed a little bit harder.