talking points #6 on Oakes

Premise:

• grouping
• tracking
• ability
• teachers
• stereotypes
• poor
• minorities
• students
• low-ability
• high-quality
• uneven opportunities
• success
• privilege
• achievement
• learning
• performance
• schooling

Author's Argument:

Oakes argues schools must get rid of grouping and all students must get the same high-quality education that is essential to success because it is not fair that some students get better educations than others.

Evidence:

1. "School professionals and parents oppose tracking because they believe it locks most students into classes where they are stereotyped as "less able" and where they have fewer opportunities to learn."
2. "Students who are placed in high-ability groups have access to far richer schooling experiences than other students."
3. Children in the low level classes are more often interrupted by problems and arguing while students in high level classes are more involved in their classwork.

Questions/comments/points to share:

I liked this article because it was so true. In high school I was in mostly honors classes and like Oakes said the students in these classes provide the best teachers, a concentration of the most successful students and may have smaller class sizes. In high school I had the best teachers and the majority of them were department heads and had been teaching for thirty years. The kids in my class were very smart and most of them were ranked in the top five percent in the class. The average size of the honors classes were about fifteen students. All of these factors contributed to me getting a better education.

On the other hand, I had friends in the "low-ability" classes and he explained the class to me as useless and crazy. He said that they really did not learn anything the whole year and the other students in the class were so ill behaved the teacher yelled at them the whole class. The reason why I did take the honors classes is to avoid these terrible classes. I do believe though if they got rid of honors classes and mixed the classes up every student would be able to get the same education. I believe that every student should get the same education and schools should get rid of tracking.