Archival Foundations: Detracking in Context

• In Event: Queer Resistance, Detracking & Racelighting: A Historical Case of an Urban Mountain-West High School

Abstract

This presentation reflects on the process of detracking a large, comprehensive high school in the Mountain West beginning school year 2018-19 and the resulting outcomes as recent as 2024-25. The long-held systems and structures that place students in homogenous school groupings by course, ability, or assumed preference, had created de facto segregation throughout the case school’s academic programs (Oakes, 1985). In an effort to respond to state-mandated school improvement, the school identified detracking core 9th grade academics (by removing Honors sections in favor of acceleration for all students) as a strategic initiative to improve student learning opportunities and outcomes schoolwide with a particular focus on racialized disparities in advanced course participation. Utilizing archival documents, district memos, site-based meeting agendas and notes (early 2000s–2010), the presentation of this case study will detail high school’s implementation story to migrate their organizational identity from an academically and racially tracked high school model to one of academic inclusion.

Author

• Katie Nitka, Salt Lake City School District