Talking Points # 6- Oakes, "Tracking: Why Schools Need to Take Another Route."

Oakes argues that when students are grouped, their are large gaps created between high and low-level students. These gaps heavily favor and aid the high-level students while keeping low-level students in a propetual cycle of failure/ lack of success.

1. "The teachers seem to be more enthusiastic, to make instructions clearer, and to use strong criticism or ridicule less frequently than teachers of low-ability classes. Classroom tasks are often better organized, and students are given a greater variety of things to do. These differneces in learning opporunities point to fundemental and ironic school inequities. Students who need more time to learn appear to get less; those who have the most difficulty learning seem to have fewer of the best teachers."

This excerpt from the article illustrates the huge differences between the learning environments created through tracking. The best students get the best teachers, and the less successful students get the less successful teachers. The classrooms environment created by teachers for the higher level students are more comfortable places to learn rather than the environments given to low-level students.

2. "In fact, studies that control for instructional differences-- providing identical curriculum and instruction to both tracked and mixed groups of studnets -- typically find that high-ability students to equally well in either setting. The fact that students are tracked seems less important than that they have other instructional advantages that seem to come along with classes that are highly able."

Studies show that students who are highly-able excell in either environment, regardless of whether the class is tracked or not. These stats show that seperating the classes has no clear benefit for the higher level students, but at the same time has detremental affects on the lower level students. Right after this excerpt, the author quotes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a very good example of that, since that it has minimal benefits to the students are more trophied, but has many negative affects to the students who need the most help.