San Francisco s Detracking Experiment Tom Loveless

San Francisco Unified School District embarked on a detracking initiative in 2015, followed by an extensive public relations campaign to portray the policy as having successfully narrowed achievement gaps.  The campaign omitted assessment data indicating that the Black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gaps have widened, not narrowed, the exact opposite of the district s intention and of the story the district was selling to the public. Only SFUSD possesses the data needed to conduct a formal evaluation that would credibly identify the causal factors producing such dismal results.

Whether detracking can assist in the quest for greater equity is an open question. It could, in fact, exacerbate inequities by favoring high achieving children from upper income families who can afford private sector workarounds–or with parents savvy enough to negotiate the bureaucratic hurdles SFUSD has erected to impede acceleration.  As I have written elsewhere, the voluminous literature on tracking is better at describing problems than in solving them. The evidence that detracking promotes equity is sparse, mostly drawing on case studies that are restricted in terms of generalizability of findings to other settings and with research designs that do not support causal inferences.

If SFUSD would now approach tracking with an open mind, officials need not look far to discover equitable possibilities. Across the bay, David Card, a scholar at UC Berkeley, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research applying innovative econometrics to thorny public policy problems. Card s recent studies, conducted with colleague Laura Giuliano, investigate tracking. In 2014, Card and Giuliano published a paper evaluating an urban district s tracking program based on prior achievement.  In particular, disadvantaged students and students of color benefitted from an accelerated curriculum, with no negative spillover effects for students pursuing the regular course of study.  Card and Giuliano concluded, Our findings suggest that a comprehensive tracking program that establishes a separate classroom in every school for the top performing students could significantly boost the performance of the most talented students in even the poorest neighborhoods, at little or no cost to other students or the District’s budget.

via tomloveless.com