The Influence of Academic Tracking on Black Caribbean Students in New York and London

• In Event: International Perspectives on Tracking and Social Injustice

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of academic tracking as an influential meso-level factor in perpetuating the historically paradoxical status positions of Black Caribbean immigrant youth in the American and British educational systems. Since the 1930s, Black Caribbeans in the US have been deemed a high-achieving Black model minority (Kasinitz et al., 2008; Warikoo, 2011). However, Black Caribbeans in Britain have been largely considered an underachieving minority since the 1950s (Gillborn, 2008; Mirza, 2009; Sivanandan, 2008). Although culture is regularly invoked as the core contributory factor influencing Caribbean students’ outcomes (Ifantunji, 2016; Model, 2008; Strand, 2012), immigration scholarship calls such claims into question by noting how macro-level factors such as the order of migration, immigrant selectivity and racialization in contexts of reception influence the disparate achievement outcomes of Black Caribbeans in the US and Britain (Bashi, 2007; Feliciano, 2005; Imoagene, 2017; Warikoo, 2010; Waters, 1999). However, scant attention has been offered to the role of in-school processes such as academic tracking in reproducing and sustaining ethnic achievement disparities.
I extend the literature by asking how academic tracking influences the contrasting educational outcomes of second-generation Black Caribbean students on both sides of the Atlantic. I draw on 16 months of ethnographic observation at two of the largest high schools in New York City and London, 48 focus groups and 60 in depth interviews with second-generation Black Caribbean young people to highlight how the differing design of, and criteria for, academic tracking in New York City and London public schools shape achievement disparities among Black Caribbeans in education. The findings suggest that Black Caribbeans are subjected to two divergent forms of academic tracking. In New York, Black Caribbean students experience a relatively flexible subject-by-subject ability grouping process, which allowed participants regular access to advanced classes in a range of courses and class years. In London, however, Caribbean students negotiate a comparatively rigid multi-year streaming process, which assigned participants to tracks across subject areas over multiple years, especially in the final years of secondary schooling. In this regard, I argue, school structures, and the tracking systems within them, are significant mediating factors in the reproduction of educational inequality.
But the results also suggest that while the design of tracking structures matters, the criteria for tracking are impactful too (Carter, 2012; Tyson, 2012). The behavioral reputation of Black Caribbean pupils assisted those in New York and often hindered those in London. In New York, Black Caribbean students’ assignment to honors and Advanced Placement classes were often based more on middle class comportment and deferential behavior than on the consistent display of distinct cognitive abilities or exam results. Whereas in London, Black Caribbean students were restricted access to ‘top sets’ not only based on grades, but also according to their past and predicted misbehaviors. For Black Caribbeans on both sides of the Atlantic, the differing tracking structures and behavioral expectations in each case school rendered academic achievement a political project in which those with strong economic and reputational resources were best positioned for academic success.

Author

• Derron Wallace, Brandeis University