Tracking in secondary education: An educational injustice

Introduction

The values that education promotes and the connections those values have to distributive justice issues are legion. One dimension of education’s value is instrumental: education connects persons to interesting work, wealth, and income, which, in turn, serve to raise the well-being of persons along a host of indicators, such as happiness, health, and life expectancy. This facet of education’s value could be subsumed under human capital theory, which integrates the value of increasing social wealth and production with the value education has for persons as contributors to increased production (Becker, 1963, 1964). This facet of education obviously raises distributive justice issues, but so do the distribution of education’s intrinsic values, for instance, reading and enjoying poetry is something wanted for its own sake, as is being cultured. Other educational goods that might be considered intrinsically valuable are autonomy, the ideal of self-governing agency, and democratic education, which promotes the capacities and characteristics necessary for effective democratic citizenship (Gutmann, 1999). Some of these values might also be both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable. For example, autonomy might not only be valued for its own sake but also for its promotion of the sort of character necessary for effective democratic participation.

Given the multiple values that education can serve, three areas of concern are raised. First, the nature of the educational provision. Each value has implications for what should be taught. Are we teaching to fill a work role, for autonomy, democratic citizenship, or academic excellence? The answer to this question will certainly have implications for the content or nature of the educational provision that should be provided to students. Second, there are priority issues lurking. If these values come into conflict, which of the values should carry the day? Third, there are process issues. The continuum of education in advanced modern industrial societies begins at pre-k (3 years old) and progresses through multiple stages – primary education, lower and upper secondary education, undergraduate education, and Master and Doctoral level. This whole continuum represents 30 years of education. If the range of education’s values specified above are all legitimate social needs, are they being pursued at the appropriate stages of the educational continuum? Can they all be pursued at different periods along the education continuum? Are current practices getting it right? For example, in the United States, there is a long-standing practice of providing vocational training in secondary education, but we are also increasingly seeing a college-preparatory education as the baseline of adequacy. Similarly, the International Standard of Classification of Education takes upper secondary education – the last 2 years of secondary education in the United States – as aiming for either college preparation or vocational training. ¹ Is a college-preparatory education now the norm for secondary education? If so, is it just that some students are still receiving vocational training during secondary education?

Providing answers to these very complex questions obviously requires a multi-disciplinary approach. In this discussion, there is certainly a prominent place for theorists considering the justice implications for children, adolescents, and emerging adults all along the education continuum. For all along this continuum, benefits of some very important kind are being distributed under conditions of scarcity. Are the systems distributing these benefits in a just way? How should these benefits be distributed? Are the right values being pursued in these systems, and what if there is a conflict of values? Distributive justice theories applied to education conceived in this multi-faceted fashion should help to assess the justice of these systems. Indeed, they may even recommend the manner and the appropriate time in which to dole out certain kinds of educational benefits and not others.

In this article, I focus on secondary education and take aim at tracking in secondary education. The structure of the article is as follows. First, I discuss tracking in secondary education in the United States and the tracking system’s connection to distributive justice issues. Second, I begin developing a conception of educational equality which, when combined with other intermediary, empirical premises, renders the implication that tracking in secondary education system is unjust.

Tracking in secondary education and distributive justice

The tracking system has its origins in a traditional conception of secondary education, according to which differentiation, specialization, and unequal education provision is appropriate. This paradigm of secondary education has had a function relative to the United States’ economic aims ever since secondary education was connected systematically to post-secondary education opportunities in the early twentieth century (Oakes, 1985: 15–39). Secondary education, on this view, is the period of preparing late adolescents, through the appropriate educational provision, for a place within the economy.

In a typical tracking system today in the United States, students are placed onto one of three tracks consisting of differential curriculums: (1) the college-level track is the elite educational provision. Advanced Placement (AP) courses give opportunities for some secondary school students to receive credit for college-level curricula in a variety of subjects. (2) The college preparatory track consists of a provision in fulfillment of college entrance requirements. ² (3) The general track falls below the level of a college-prep education and leads students out of the educational continuum and into a vocation.

The fact that secondary schools offer higher quality educational opportunities to some students and not others within the tracking system raises concerns about the just distribution of educational opportunities. These concerns might be mollified for policy makers by the prevailing ‘rhetoric and policy of providing an “adequate” education for all’, which aims to establish some ground floor provision of education under which no student should fall. From this perspective, the priority is to ensure that students have enough, not that they are provided for equally. ³ The prevailing focus on adequacy among policy makers tends to neutralize concern for the educational inequalities inherent in the tracking system and to deemphasize inequalities above the adequacy level. ⁴

However, the social justice concerns for educational egalitarians are palpable for two reasons. First, AP opportunities are arguably positional goods in the sense that they increase a student’s prospects in the competition for admission to prestigious universities. They increase a student’s prospects for college admissions by boosting one’s GPA with additional grade points not offered to non-AP students, increasing college entrance exam scores, and by regarding AP participation and performance as an indicator of student readiness for the rigors of a college curriculum. If AP participation increases prospects for admission to prestigious universities, then it also increases AP participants’ prospects in the competition for high-paying and interesting jobs (Brighouse and Swift, 2006). Furthermore, there is evidence that the AP program is used by parents of high socio-economic status (SES) to provide their children with additional advantage over lower SES children, thereby perpetuating social inequalities inter-generationally (Klugman, 2013; Tai, 2008). In public school settings, socially advantaged students in wealthier catchment areas get a disproportionate share of these opportunities vis-à-vis lesser advantaged students in lower-income areas. It follows that AP provisions being offered unequally broaches questions of justice.

Second, the fact of scarcity entails that educational resources for some types of educational provisions may require unjust transferences of resources from other programs. For example, funding for AP may require a transfer of funds supporting the less advantaged that could bring students’ general skills up to adequacy. There are also collateral effects of the AP program that need to be weighed, such as increased class sizes for non-AP classes and use of high-quality teachers for AP classes, who could be of benefit to non-AP students (Warne, 2017). The cost-effectiveness and effects of the AP program speak not only to efficiency considerations, such as whether the AP program is the most effective way to spend scarce resources. They also speak to considerations of justice, for it may be that the more talented students are receiving these benefits concomitant with undue burden for the less advantaged students.

Toward an autonomy-based educational equality theory

The ideal of educational equality is based on equality as such, the fundamental idea of equal consideration for all persons (Dworkin, 2000). It requires that in the distribution of educational opportunity, each child should get equal consideration. Prima facie the ideal may seem incompatible with tracking in secondary education as characterized above. In fact, the ideal of equality alone can neither approve nor condemn this institutional arrangement. To get a judgment either way, a substantive conception of educational equality ⁵ is needed along with additional intermediate, empirical premises pertaining to the tracking system. This is characteristic of all applied theory in the genre of ‘real world justice’, which will have a movement from the general (the formal conception of distributive justice) to the less general (the substantive conception of distributive justice and the intermediate premises pertaining to the specific domain of application). ⁶ The remainder of this section will begin developing a substantive conception.

The substantive conception of educational equality consists in an answer to the question: equality of what? ⁷ It more specifically defines the way that the formal ideal is to be enacted by clarifying the value that is to be equalized across the population. This article answers the ‘equality of what question’ with autonomy. The view is an amalgamation of autonomy-based considerations and a conception of distributive justice that Allen Buchanan (1990) calls subject-centered (as opposed to reciprocity-based) justice. Justice as reciprocity takes the subject of distributive justice to be an actual or potential contributor in society’s system of production (i.e. its economy). By contrast, on a subject-centered conception of justice, equal consideration of persons is with reference to their needs and capacities, and questions of distributive justice are based on what can collectively be done to meet the needs and develop the capacities of persons as such. Following Buchanan’s lead, rather than regarding late adolescents as subjects of justice under a reciprocity view, I regard them as subjects under the subject-centered view. Among the greatest needs of late adolescents in secondary education is the development of the capacities necessary for the exercise of autonomy. Educational provision is instrumental toward the development of these capacities. As subjects of justice who are entitled to equal consideration on the basis of their needs, late adolescents should, therefore, be given equal opportunities for the development of autonomy. I will argue that this autonomy-based view of educational equality proscribes tracking in secondary education because it violates the autonomy of late adolescents.

Personal autonomy is the ideal of self-governing agency, an aspect of personality referencing the capacity to choose and implement how to live one’s life in accordance with desires, preferences, characteristics, and considerations that are in some sense the person’s own and not merely externally imposed (Buss and Westlund, 2018; Christman, 2018; Dworkin, 1988). As an educational aim generally, the development of autonomy implies that education should not aim for indoctrination or selection into a role by means of processes or influences that are merely externally imposed. Autonomy aims to create persons who can choose their worldview (the fundamental beliefs about the world and their place in it) and their life-path (personal and vocational) in accordance with their own desires and considerations that are not merely externally imposed.

There are at least three more specific requirements of autonomy as applied to late adolescents in secondary education. First, there is the familiar requirement for autonomy that late adolescents be taught the skills to think critically about their inherited worldviews, for they will at that point have acquired from their parents and other influences (such as friends, teachers, and ministers) some fundamental beliefs about the world and their place in it. Thinking critically about inherited worldviews requires an education in the fundamentals of reasoning (as embodied in the discipline of logic as a body of knowledge) and exposure to alternative worldviews and individuals espousing those alternatives (Brighouse, 2006: 24–25).

Second, autonomy applies not only to the choice of which worldview to espouse but also to vocational choices. In an advanced industrial society, vocational (or career) choices have monumental and long-term consequences on the specific life-path a person takes and hence considerations of autonomy should be applied to that domain of a person’s life. Autonomy, therefore, should aim to create a person who can choose and implement vocational choices that are based on the person’s own desires and considerations and that are not merely externally imposed. Vocational choices that are merely foisted upon adolescents or vocational choices that adolescents are forced to prematurely make are violations of autonomy.

Third, autonomy also requires nurturing the capacity of self-confidence so that adolescents can deem themselves as self-governing agents rather than passive recipients of views grounded in external authority. ‘Relational autonomy’ views, as they are sometimes called, emphasize the relational, sympathetic connections that are requisite to the development of autonomy (Buss and Westlund, 2018). One example is that of a parent, who plays a unique role in promoting the correct dispositions in the child required for self-governing (such as determining when trust is warranted, using common sense, and promoting a sense of competency and mastery). These relational requirements also apply in a secondary education setting where late adolescents are influenced by the various elements of an institutional environment, including the quality of teacher–student relations, school climate and disciplinary policies, and curricular requirements.

This subject-centered and autonomy-based view of educational equality implies that it is more important to develop the capacities necessary for autonomy than the skills to be a worker. Therefore, the educational aim of developing autonomy constrains competing economic educational aims, and whenever there is a conflict between the two, it is the educational aim of autonomy which should take precedence. It may be possible to harmonize the two aims by constraining the economic goals sufficiently so as not to impede the autonomy goals (Brighouse, 2006). But there can be no reconciliation between the goal of autonomy and the tracking system in secondary education (which is one institutional form in which economic goals might be pursued). The tracking system in secondary education is unjust because it hinders the development of autonomy among adolescents in three ways (as I argue below):

Vocational choices during secondary education violate this requirement because vocational choices come with opportunity costs of further discovery of actual talents by grouping adolescents into differential, specialized curriculums. Rather than being a period during which choice of vocation is to be decided, then, secondary education should be a period where late adolescents do not overly specialize, are offered a liberal curriculum emphasizing breadth, and get a real opportunity to learn which talents they actually have through a sufficiently broad array of activities.

A good frame of reference for the reconsideration of this process is Michael Walzer’s (1983) discussion of education justice in his Spheres of Justice. Walzer distinguishes an early stage of democratic education where equal educational provisions are provided and a later stage of specialized education where unequal educational provisions are distributed on the basis of aptitude and effort. According to Walzer, there is no natural cut-off point between the periods of democratic and specialized education and the issue will be subject to democratic debate. Now if specialized education which aims to produce the economy’s future workers is a legitimate social need, when to begin it will obviously be subject to the contingencies of a given system of production. (Some are beginning to beat the drum about the effects of automation and a resultant job-less economy, which would render the idea that education should aim to prepare us for some job into obsolescence.)

Supposing specialized education to be a legitimate aim, when should the aim of preparing for the economy’s future workers begin? Should it begin during secondary or tertiary (college) education? Given that the capacity for autonomous choice fully develops during emerging adulthood, vocational education and vocational choices should be postponed until tertiary education. The adolescent development theories cited above provide empirical evidence that premature vocational choices will likely be heteronymous and unstable. Given the inchoate capacity for autonomy among late adolescents, their career choices will likely be determined by contextual factors, such as existing opportunity structures and the desire to please parents and school officials (Sheldon and Elliot, 1998). This is corroborated in social science research producing evidence that career-goal development among late adolescents is unstable and likely to change during emerging adulthood and tertiary education (Malin et al., 2013; Nurmi & Salmela-Aro, 2002; Salmela-Aro and Nurmi, 1997). These considerations support the idea that the earlier career choices are made by adolescents, the more likely those choices will be heteronymous. Therefore, the later we postpone those choices to the age of 25, when the prefrontal cortex is fully developed, the more autonomous these choices will be. A reasonable compromise, then, in light of these considerations and the contingencies of the U.S. economy is the postponement of vocational choices to tertiary education.

Such is not the case, however, for the late adolescents who are placed on the lower end of the tracking system. The evidence shows that low placement in a tracking system leads to a negative school experience and negative attitudes toward education. In addition to the distribution of inferior educational provisions, being placed on the lower end of the tracking system stifles the development of self-confidence by promoting feelings of incompetency and contributing to anti-social behavior (Eccles, 2004: 136). Feelings of incompetency arise when students have the mistaken perception that they have been placed on a lower track because they lack the higher native intelligence of students who are on a college-prep or college-level track. Exposure to, and relationship-formation with, peers who have similar perceptions and attitudes toward education results in anti-social behavior (such as truancy, crime, and misbehavior in school).

Since the tracking system stifles the development of self-confidence among low-tracked late adolescents, it is a violation of their autonomy. They are being denied the opportunity and the educational experience that is necessary to gain a sense of competency, which would allow them to regard themselves as self-governing agents, not mere passive recipients of the views of others.

Conclusion

This article has shown that the tracking system violates the autonomy of late adolescents and is therefore unjust. That system has no place in a just society and the secondary education system in the United States requires fundamental revamping. The aim of autonomy development among late adolescents in secondary education is best achieved through the curriculum of a liberal aiming education for college preparation, given its emphasis on breadth, which will give students the diversity of experiences necessary for the development of autonomy. With the completion of a rigorous college preparatory curriculum, emerging adults can then either decide to enter the work force after graduating secondary education with a set of basic skills applicable across a range of occupations or enter college prepared for the rigors of college-level curricula to develop further skills across an even larger range of occupations.

This conclusion unequivocally implies the injustice of placing students on a curricular pathway to a vocation and/or out of the educational continuum. As to the justice of retaining elite (AP) educational provisions, this question is not answerable within the scope of this article. That question will depend on whether one is a relational or non-relational (prioritarian) egalitarian, which I have not taken a position on in this article. ⁹ Relational egalitarianism takes the gap between college-preparatory and elite provisions in education as unjust in itself, and something to be closed; hence, the educational inequality is unjust. A less strict egalitarian view would give greater weight to the interests of the less advantaged in assessing the policy of having these differential educational provisions. If having elite educational provisions leads to greater production which redounds to the benefit of the less advantaged, then the educational inequality is not unjust.