Social Programs Pros And Cons

Few social programs have the reach and impact as schooling. However, due to its overarching nature there exists a massive dichotomy in the most effective way to employ the immense social program. It seems as if experts have divided themselves into two camps of thought surrounding the underlying structure of education. On one side exist those who see school as a chance to early distinguish students in order to individualize the learning experience. In this faction, an idealized meritocracy emerges from signaling manifested in test scores and rather arbitrary judgments of intelligence. The benefits of such a system, known as tracking, allow for a more efficient and tailored approach to education. However, it increasingly disenfranchises massive …show more content…
For this group, teaching is more generalized, which runs the risk of underserving those students who have the capacity to succeed at higher levels and excluding those who learn at a slower pace. Each bloc is a derived symptom existing from problems stemming from a static and complacent education system. It seems that both have various pros and cons, however in a more broad scope it becomes clear that tracking disenfranchises an overwhelming proportion of the student population. And by merits of overall child development, tracking should not be employed to the general education system. This is not to argue that the alternative is that much better, rather that tracking does not benefit enough children and therefore should not be recommended for the overarching student …show more content…
Many studies and prominent researchers have suggested that tracking disproportionately affects minority and low-income students in overwhelming quantities (Goodlad & Oakes, 1988; Mehan, 1992). The current system of tracking it seems stimulates and enhances deep divides in our society’s collective subconscious. Under this pretense there endures thousands of children who are classified based on race and income regardless of intellectual potential. This results in children being judged from an early age based on biased tests of intelligence and potential, who are then placed into low tier tracks that negatively effect their future intellectual development. Here the argument exists that because of the overwhelming lack of oversight into the discrimination stemming from tracking is increasingly affecting a rapidly growing segment of our country’s population that the negatives of tracking begin to significantly overshadow the limited successes of individualized