By: DuWayne Krause

DuWayne Krause — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 21:27:03 +0000

Tracking has a long history of relegating the poor and racial minorities to a second rate education and thus limit their professional outlooks. The research that I read says that the students who improve the most in a no track system are actually the higher ability kids. The speculation is that when kids of all ability levels work together the high ability kids have to get concepts clear in their own minds, in order to help others. This leads to their better mastery of material. A lot of people (particularly many parents) want to push kids along in math. My experience has been that this often results in kids who can blindly execute techniques, but have a relatively low understanding of what they are doing. I once taught 8th grade math at a small school. The kids in my regular 8th grade classes that I was teaching understanding too had deeper understanding of math than the kids who had been advanced a year or two, who dropped in on us periodically. Jobs analysis, in the United States says that the math of the workplace for 80% of Americans is arithmetic, ratio, proportion, percent, and beginning statistics. We do a lot of rushing kids along to higher math without mastering what most of them need to know, for their adult lives.

Comments on: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. Some districts buck the trend

By: DuWayne Krause