ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how forces outside the school walls shaped the ability of educators to implement "detracking reform—to question existing track structures and promote greater access to challenging classes for all students. It examines the political practices of local elites in the school communities we studied. The elites discussed here had children enrolled in the detracking schools and thus constitute the subgroup of local elites active in shaping school policies. The chapter discusses the political popularity of decentralized school governance and growth of school-site councils with broad decision-making power. H. Beare writes that the middle class is a very willing accomplice in the strategy to create such councils and "empower" parents to make important decisions about how schools are run. The chapter reviews documents and wrote field notes about our observations within the schools and the communities. Traditional hierarchical track structures in schools have been validated by the conflation of culture and intelligence.
