Crossing Tracks: How Students in Mainstream and Advanced-Track Classes Discuss Their Career Aspirations

• In Event: 52.079 - Tracked in or Tracked Out: How Students and Teachers Make Sense of Curricular Tracking

Abstract

This research presentation seeks to illustrate how tracking produces within-school segregation, which, in turn, shapes the future aspirations of students. Scholars have shown that while schools have become more racially integrated over the years, another sociological phenomenon has occurred: within-school segregation as brought on by tracking. Seven students from the same high school in two separate academic tracks participated in this phenomenological study. Results reveal how divergent tracks created a school within a school, where students were homogeneously grouped and had limited contact with students from other groups. Each track formed and/or limited the future aspirations of the students it served.

Author

• Todd McCardle, Eastern Kentucky University