ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses academic sorting practices and their selective determinants such as teacher expectations, race, and socioeconomic status in influencing black students' scholastic success or failure. It provides some practical recommendations and strategies for minimizing and remedying the negative effects that ability grouping and tracking have on the academic achievement of black students. Teacher expectations are inferences made by the teacher about present and future academic achievement and general classroom behavior of students. The self-fulfilling prophecy begins as a false definition of the situation, which then causes a new behavior that makes the originally false conception come true. Lower tracked students get less of whatever is distributed educationally. Oakes further argued that for low tracked students, schools are more of a burden than an asset. A monitoring process should also be initiated to insure implementation of the recommendations.
