Publisher's Synopsis
Few educational practices arouse the fervour and partisanship that tracking does. Proponents argue that differentiating course-work is a fair and efficient means of meeting the needs of diverse individuals, but critics counter that curriculum differentiation stigmatizes and further injures groups already disadvantaged. The result of decades of such debate is a stalemate: tracking continues to be widely but ambivalently practiced in US high schools.;This book explores and explicates the stalemate to offer a way of thinking that moves beyond it. By taking readers inside eight lower-track classrooms in two middle-class high schools, the case study documents the ambiguous rather than clear-cut meaning that tracking has for the teachers and students who encounter it most directly. By detailing the dynamics and circumstances in which teachers and students construct lower-track lessons, it illustrates how and when they vary, and thereby makes their ambiguity understandable and workable rather than merely blamable.;Finally, by considering the relationship between curricular and cultural differentiation (including precepts such as gender, social class and age), it traces the crucial social as well as scholastic import of ordinary school lessons: students and teachers learn their places as they learn their lessons because differentiated curricula are "ambiguous translations", produced in schools, of the cherished but contradictory values of individualism and community that define American culture. Paradoxically, US schools must differentiate but they must not discriminate. In tracking, they seek both to provide for each student's individual potential and, contrarily, to provide for all students' equal opportunity. In addition to a theoretical reconstruction of tracking, the book addresses issues of practice and policy.;This is a supplemental text for a wide variety of curriculum courses as well as courses in teacher education, sociology and anthropology, and educational administration and policy.
