Should Tracking in Schools be Eliminated?

In my opinion, tracking in schools does way more damage than good and needs to be eliminated. As we discussed in the critical conversation, there are countless negative repercussions of tracking, both emotional and academic, that outweigh its pros. While tracking in theory provides differentiated and individualized instruction to meet the needs of students, like many other ideas, it does not succeed in practice. Placing students in tracks based on tests or specific instances of academic success is to me problematic because it does not take into account the whole student, and often lends itself to racial stereotyping. An online definition of tracking that I found is: "In a tracking system, the entire school population is assigned to classes according to whether the students' overall achievement is above average, normal, or below average." I feel that labeling a student as any of these three categories is much too definitive of a way to classify a student's achievement. Not to mention the detrimental psychological effects of being labeled as "below average" at a young age. Even if a student is placed into a track and then later gets out of it, the initial act of being placed into that track will still stay with them. As Olivia pointed out, tracking creates invisible barriers for people that may not go away for their entire life. If a student is in the lower track and has the ability to move to the higher track, they most likely will not do it because of these barriers already put in place, and the low expectations that the student has of him/herself due to their placement in the "below average" track. In short, tracking puts students into a box that it is difficult to get out of. It is a system that is outdated and needs to be dismantled.