Talking Point #7

"Tracking: Why Schools Need To Take Another Route" By Jeannie Oakes

Jeannie Oakes' main point is that she gives two perspectives of the teaching strategy called tracking and i feel like she is trying to say that tracking is a bad thing and that it needs to be changed in order to help everyone in the school system and not just the "smarter" kids.

1.)"Many express particular concern about tracking's effects on poor and minority students, who are placed in low-ability groups more often than other students and are less likely to be found in programs for gifted students or in college preparatory tracks."

This quote is important to the article because it is one of the primary reasons that people are opposed to tracking. Tracking limits the abilities of students that, for all we know, could have gone on to do great and powerful things if they were not held back from their full potential.

2.) "One fact about tracking is unequivocal: tracking leads to substantial differences in the day-to-day learning experiences students have at school. Moreover, the nature of these differences suggests that students who are placed in high-ability groups bave access to far richer schooling experiences than otber students."

This quote is important to the article because it reinforces the quote that i had coppied down above. The students in the higher level classes are taught to think the way that they do and the same goes for the lower level classes. This is also one of the reasons that children that seem so smart are held back or that they say that they arent having a good experience in school. They are either not "priviledged" enough or that they are held back to the point where they are bored with the work that they are doing and they would like to be challenged once in a while.

3.) "Creating constructive alternatives to tracking presents technical as well as political problems."

This quote kind of got to me. if something is bad for students, wouldn't it be the right thing to do to change that problem as soon as possible. I know that it says that jumbling the students together is not the correct way to do things, but isnt it better than the way that students are already learning.

I thought that this article was very interesting and fun to read. This article basically summed up by entire educational career up to college. They always separated the "smarter" kids in my schooling environment and the same with the "slower" kids. If someone were to come up with a different method than tracking in order to give the smarter kids a challenge, the slower kids an easy enough time with the material and the kids that are in the middle enough time to handle it. If someone was to come up with a teaching method to incorporate all these things, then they should win the nobel prize since, at least in my perspective, this feat is next to impossible.