Tracking is a reality in high school, writes Fordham’s Michael Petrilli. “Some kids enter high school at a fifth-grade level, others at an eleventh-grade level,” according to pre-pandemic data, he writes.
Does anyone think we can effectively teach students with such extreme degrees of academic preparation (or lack thereof) in the same classroom and serve them well?
In a recent American Compass survey, 86 percent of parents supported “tracking” (or “diverse pathways”), he notes.
Educators have been “de-tracking” for decades, writes Petrilli, but the most they’ve done is to combine college prep with the old voc-ed track.
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He estimates the honors track serves about 20 percent of students and the college/career track about half, roughly those from the 30th to the 80th percentile of achievement.
More college/career students are pushed toward higher-level work than in the past he writes, but they have little time for career courses. Petrilli calls for splitting college and career prep after 10th grade, as recommended by Maryland’s Kirwan commission. Career-minded students would focus on apprenticeships and technical coursework, while college-minded students would do “true college prep.”
That leaves about 30 percent of students on what he calls the “credit recovery track.” (Petrilli observes that 32 percent of eighth graders are “below basic” in math and 28 percent “below basic” in reading, according to NAEP.) In earlier eras, they’d drop out, but schools now use online credit recovery and EZ pass grading to push low achievers to a devalued diploma.
There is “no evidence to suggest that students ever benefited in the labor market from online credit recovery in high school,” researchers write. It’s a dead end.
