ABSTRACT
When James Rosenbaum conducted his seminal case study of tracking in the early 1970s, he found that the track structure at Grayton High could be described using the metaphor of a “tournament” (Rosenbaum, 1976). Rather than low-track courses presenting an opportunity for students to work hard and eventually move into college-preparatory classes, upward mobility at Grayton was practically non-existent. For the cohort of students Rosenbaum observed, not a single student left the general or business track in the ninth grade to move up into the college track by twelfth grade (Rosenbaum, 1976, table 3.4). Meanwhile, high-track students had to work quite hard to maintain their place in the curricular hierarchy, or they would soon find themselves in regular-track courses where the likelihood of going to a competitive university was much lower. Rosenbaum studied a single school, and subsequent research on the educational trajectory of students has found substantially more movement, both up and down the track hierarchy, than did Rosenbaum. In most schools, the curriculum is not literally organized as a single-elimination tournament, as it appeared to be at Grayton. Nevertheless, only a small proportion of low-track students actually move into college-preparatory classes during high school and stay there. Lucas (1999) found that about 12 percent of students in mathematics and 21 percent of students in English had a net upward movement over the last two years of high school.1 A student who begins secondary school in low-track classes will likely finish high school in low-track classes.
