Origins of Race-based Tracking in School Desegregation
The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court ruling of 1954 determined that the separate school statute established by Plessy v. Ferguson was unconstitutional, but a plan was not set forth for desegregating schools until the following year with the Brown II case. For schools in most southern regions of the United States, integration did not occur until the early 1970s. Mickelson (2003) stated that tracking was used as a tool to maintain white privilege by placing African-American students in lower academic tracks in Charlotte, North Carolina public schools after the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg desegregation ruling. Haney (1978) did a historical analysis on the negative effects of desegregation on African-American educators. At the secondary school level, African-American teachers or less qualified white teachers were assigned to teach African American students. Teachers in lower tracks were also found to be less organized in preparing lessons and taught fewer concepts to students (Oakes, 1987).
The origins of race-based tracking actually reach as far back as the federal court ruling in Roberts v. The City of Boston in 1850, a case that upheld separate school curriculums for blacks and whites on the belief in inherent racial differences in intelligence (Harvard Law Review, 1989). During the mid- to late-1980s, there were a few federal court cases in the Mississippi and Georgia the involved unfair race-based tracking in school systems. Quarles v. Oxford Municipal Separate School District, NAACP v. Georgia, and Montgomery v. Starkville Municipal Separate School District each ruled in favor of school districts based on the argument that socioeconomic status was a legitimate reason for tracking. Courts also held the belief that racial discrimination in education was a thing of the past by the 1980s (Harvard Law Review, 1989). Unfortunately, in rural areas of Mississippi and Georgia, African-Americans were made of a large proportion of low income students, placing them in lower academic tracks. As late as 2009, Childers (in press) found that in a successful Ohio high school that was majority African-American, students of color were still placed in lower academic tracks at a rate that did not reflect the student population. The argument for the proliferation of African-Americans in lower tracks was student choice rather than racially based practices of administrators (Childers, in press).
Read more about this topic: Tracking (education)
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