Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics, and Resistance to Reform

“Cohen, 1990; Tyack & Cuban, 1995) and of hierarchical and exclusive ideologies of intelligence (Oakes et al., 1997) in the face of reform is well-documented.”

“…know the race or ethnicity of individual speakers, the people speaking here takes the perspective of the White middle-class or affluent parents who often wield enormous and disproportionate influence on schools and school policy (see e.g., Lee, 2005; Noguera & Wing, 2008; Oakes et al., 1997).”

“Oakes et al. (1997) found that when families of students in gifted programmes were given responsibility for evaluating the overall impact of tracking, they grew supportive of an inclusive approach.”

“Oakes et al. (1997) argue that fundamentally, the ways in which teachers view ability and intelligence underlie their resistance to detracking.”

“As discussed earlier, research on tracking and ability grouping has found strong evidence that lower tracked students tend to stay in low tracks with reduced expectations, resulting in a widening gap between students (Boaler, 2006, 2008; Burris et al., 2006; Oakes, 1985; Oakes et al., 1997; Slavin, 1987).”

“This finding also highlights that access is a social construct borne of a social process in which elites create and define such construct for producing racial inequities across high-quality educational opportunities (Oakes et al., 2002, 1997).”

“…incentives for schools to develop more inclusive curricula, this research tradition suggests that teachers and administrators will continue to sort students based on their prior achievement (Oakes & Guiton, 1995; Oakes et al., 1997; Sandholtz, Ogawa, & Scribner, 2004; Wilson & Rossman, 1993).”

“Oakes (1992) showed parents’ and teachers’ vested interest in tracking, as ingrained views of talents and abilities upheld racialized tracks, despite district intentions (Oakes et al. 1997).”

“My point here is not that California's planners are inept-I hope they will learn from experience and get it right eventually-but that implementation holds the key, and effective implementation of even the most inspired idea cannot be taken for granted (nor can the political will be taken for granted, witness the resis…”

“This is important work, as deficit perspectives are deeply entrenched in educators’ conceptions of learners and learning, historically highly resistant to reform (Artiles, 1998; Oakes et al., 1997).”

“There is a substantive corpus of international research about setting and streaming practices (e.g. Boaler, 1997; Oakes, 2005; Oakes et al., 1997): most of it suggests that when appropriate pedagogies are used, mixed ability teaching is beneficial to more children than setting practices.”

“…to broaden standards for mathematical proficiency or end institutional tracking are consistently met with political opposition (S. Johnson, 2021; Oakes et al., 1997; Schoenfeld, 2004), and at the classroom level, tasks designed to engage students in reasoning and problem solving are often…”

“…social construction of the ECHS target population that emerged during implementation embodied the same elitist assumptions about which students are deserving of rigorous college preparation that produce and replicate educational hierarchies in the first place (Oakes et al., 1997; Hatt, 2012).”

“…1995) too often avoided, subverted or made improbable in schools owing to deepseated ideological beliefs about the goals of schooling (Tye, 2000), highly stratified academic tracking within schools (Oakes & Wells, 1997), and/or the growing resegregation of school districts (Orfield et al., 2002).”

“Critical theorists have argued that schools reinforce traditional patterns of privilege, perpetuating a system of haves and have-nots through practices such as tracking that ensure differential patterns of achievement (Bowles & Ghtis, 1976; Knapp & Woolverton, 1995; Oakes et al., 1997).”

“There are important studies that have highlighted how change efforts confronted deep-seated belief systems and challenging political environments (e.g., Diamond et al., 2021; Oakes et al., 1997; Payne, 2012; Welner, 2001).”

“Oakes et al. (1997) shed light on how the construction of intelligence and race contributed to racially seg-regated classrooms.”

“As Oakes et al. (1997) explained, “Definitions and understandings of intelligence, like all meanings, are sensitive to the cultural contexts in which they are constructed” (p. 486).”

“The literature is rife with examples of such resistance especially from those who benefit from the present system (Johnson & Shapiro, 2003; Oakes et al., 2012).”

“Contrastingly, students of color are viewed as less gifted and are placed in vocational programs instead of college preparatory educational tracks (Oakes, 2008; Oakes et al., 1997).”

“Oakes et al. (1997), de hecho, acuñaron el concepto de «ideología de la inteligencia» para referirse a la forma a través de la cual los discursos docentes mayoritarios sobre la «inteligencia», la «habilidad» y la «capacidad» de sus estudiantes tendían a construirse de modo aislado de sus contextos…”

“As Oakes et al. (1997) might have predicted, we found that in classrooms where ability is understood as innate, fixed, or unidimensional, both kids and adults are most likely to reproduce racialized skill gaps within the student cohort.”

“Furthermore, studies have documented how large urban public schools with diverse student populations still reproduce racial and socio-economic tracking within the school itself (Lopez, 2003; Oakes, 1997; Weis & Fine, 2005; Wells, Holme, Atanda, & Revilla, 2005).”

“With regards to the second research question, there was a shared understanding among some of Franklin High’s mathematics teachers about historical injustices caused by tracking (Oakes et al., 1997).”

“…among African American and Hispanic students is an important area of inquiry because scholars argue that teachers often resist increasing access to high academic options (Oakes et al., 1997) and that test-based accountability can lead to increased tracking of students (Watanabe, 2008).”

“For example, it is well known that organizations that configure curricular offerings based on tracking pupils more often than not deny minority students participation in gifted and talented (GT) programs and advanced placement (AP) coursework (Mansfield, 2011; Oakes, 2005; Oakes & Wells, 1998; Oakes et al., 1997; Sout…”

“It could be argued that teachers’ beliefs about intelligence are just as important because they have been found to affect students’ beliefs about intelligence (Oakes et al., 1997; Watanabe, 2006), which in turn impacts students’ motivation and achievement (Dweck, 1999).”

“Within increasingly racially and socio-economically diverse schools, many researchers have called the pattern of G&T tracking a paradox of desegregation and integration (Carter, 2012; Oakes et al., 1997; Tyson, 2011).”

“Oakes et al. (2012) have noted that some have gone as far as to suggest that gifted education practices are “a masquerade sometimes for institutional racism and classism” (p. 303).”

“For example, structures like academic tracking often prevent students of color from accessing advanced classes in diverse school settings, and can preclude all students from having access to integrated classrooms even when schools are diverse (Lewis & Diamond, 2017; Oakes et al., 1997).”

“This is not generally the case in racially and socioeconomically diverse schools (Cucchiara, 2013; Noguera & Wing, 2006; Oakes et al., 1997).”

“Extract 7 (O’Donnell et al., 2009) No aspect of intelligence has been more hotly debated than the influence of heredity versus environment, and this debate relates to our earlier discussion of crystallized and fluid intelligence.”

“El tracking y el streaming, en particular, han sido ampliamente señalados como las prácticas organizativas por excelencia para legitimar diferentes modelos pedagógicos y curriculares para diferentes tipos de estudiantes (OAKES et al, 1997).”

“The present research provides current-day findings that tracking was not only about talents, abilities, and skills, but about powerful elite groups in the city and school that intentionally wanted to maintain a duplicity of equality (Oakes et al., 1997).”

“When one becomes “bad” at something in school, he or she stands the chance of encountering an education entirely different from someone else who is described as “gifted” or “accelerated” (Oakes, 1985, 1997).”

“Challenges arose, however, because not all teachers felt they had the tools to teach heterogeneously grouped classes, and some also felt that not all students had the “raw material” to be successful in honors and advanced placement courses (Oakes et al., 1997).”

“…feature of US educational discourse, having come into fashion as a response to the racial integration of schools (Mickelson, 2001), come under fire in the push for detracking, and remained the topic of a heated political battle (Loveless, 2011; Oakes, 2005; Oakes et al., 1997; Wells & Serna, 2017).”

“(p. 486) Intelligence is seen as “innate, stable, and inherited” (Oakes et al., 1997, p. 486), and as unlikely to be significantly altered by schooling.”

“However, when mathematics is understood as universal and objective, and therefore neutral, value free, and color-blind (Ernest, 2018), mathematical ability is constructed as innate and fixed (Hottinger, 2016), with “normal” differences in students’ needs and capacities (Oakes et al., 1997).”

“…student bodies (Francis and Darity 2021), and advantaged families sometimes hoard school resources (Hol-land 2019), resist efforts to dismantle tracking systems (Oakes et al. 1997), and push for their children to be placed in advanced coursework (Lewis-McCoy 2014; Sattin-Bajaj and Roda 2020).”

“We have ensured their access to experiences—inside school and out—that value their social, cultural, and linguistic border-crossing experiences, and we have supported them to navigate school as bilingual/bicultural and racial/ethnic Others.”

“Ability can be wrongly conceptualized as a singular accessible variable (Merritt, 2018) that can be sampled via assessment and evaluation efforts (Oakes et al., 1997; Oakes, 2005).”

“…schools structure students’ options via the discourse of ‘‘ability’’ translated via grouping, setting and tracking practices (Gillbourn and Youdel, 2000, Oakes et al. 1997), then the policy solution will also focus on professional development and school reform projects that tackle in-school…”