Tracking

Just read a post by Ross Crockett on the Committed Sardine website and he made an interesting comment about tracking. "Apprenticeships have long been popular in Europe, but workforce--oriented high school training is not nearly as common in U.S. schools. One reason is that such programs sound dangerously similar to tracking--sorting students by ability level, a practice repeatedly rejected in U.S. culture, in which the dominant philosophy is that all students should have opportunity to meet their full potential." I have been teaching in a high school setting for twenty-five years and trying to get an English department to reduce or rethink tracking was impossible until the past couple of years. The philosophy was that we have to track due to ability and not a thought was given to preparing students for the real job world. College does not guarantee a good income but there are apprenticeships (carpenter, electrician, plumber) that do provide good jobs with good income and we need to be preparing students in every subject for these types of jobs. American education is hung up on four years of math (not everyone needs it), four years of English (people will do well without it), two to three years of science (two years yes, more...........no) and two and one-half years of Social Studies (no comment, I'm the department chair so can't be fair). I have built homes for a living, didn't need calculus or trig, in fact I worked with my high school math teacher.....poor guy couldn't apply his geometry to building a house to save his life. This is where the real problem lies, we need to have people teaching math who have used the math in real world experience and can relate the theory and formula to actual situations. Tracking, in the negative, must go and be replaced by preparation for the real world.