ABSTRACT
This chapter describes tracking patterns in first grade, when the process commences, and how they articulate with initial program placements in middle school. It begins to explore structural constraints that originate in children's very first encounters with educational tracking. The data come from Beginning School Study, which since 1982 has been monitoring the academic progress and personal development of 790 youngsters who began first grade that year in 20 Baltimore City public schools. The sampling of schools spans the range of socioeconomic levels in the City system, as well as different school integration contexts, with whites, relatively well-to-do neighborhoods and integrated schools oversampled to sustain strategic comparisons. According to interview data obtained from 82% of the original 790 in the spring of Year 11, just 48% at that point were eleventh graders. These youngsters all started out together as first graders in the fall of 1982, but over the years much has happened to move them onto different educational pathways.
