Jeannie Oakes

Matchmaking: The Dynamics of High School Tracking Decisions:

Over the past 20 years, research has expanded educators’ knowledge of the impact of high school tracking on students’ curriculum opportunities and outcomes. Researchers also know that students are unevenly distributed among tracks, with low-income and minority students more likely to be in low ability classes for the non-college-bound. At the same time, they still understand little about how schools actually match particular students to tracked courses. Scholars and educators variously draw on technical/structural (e.g., a match between tracking and the differentiated structure of workforce), cultural (e.g., norms regarding race, social class, and educational prospects), and political or individualistic (e.g., choice, parent pressure) theories to explain students’ track assignments. To shed further light on the school dynamics that shape track-related course taking, we provide findings from a 2-year examination of tracking decisions at three comprehensive high schools. Setting these findings against prior theoretical and empirical work, we suggest an eclectic explanation that blends structural, cultural, and individualistic explanations for track assignments. High school tracking decisions, we conclude, result from the synergy of three powerful factors: differentiated, hierarchical curriculum structures; school cultures alternatively committed to common schooling and accommodating differences; and political actions by individuals within those structures and cultures aimed at influencing the distribution of advantage. Both research on tracking and efforts at school restructuring could benefit from this broader perspective.

What Educational Indicators? The Case for Assessing the School Context

A number of current federal and state efforts are attempting to create education indicator systems in the hope that these systems will improve the monitoring of the condition of education, inform policy decisions, and provide better accountability mechanisms. This article argues that the valid and useful indicator systems will include assessments of school context as well as of student outcomes. Context indicators can be used to monitor schooling resources and processes; they may help forestall educators’ tendency to narrow their programs in order to “look good” on limited outcome measures; and they can provide information about the context in which particular outcomes are achieved. A review of the schooling literature suggests three general constructs that can serve as grounding for developing school context indicators: access to knowledge, press for achievement, and professional teaching conditions.

Tracking, Inequality, and the Rhetoric of Reform: Why Schools Don't Change.

This paper looks critically at the historical, political, and economic context of differentiated schooling. The argument is made that this context explains the failure to address inequality in the current agenda for educational reform. The present inattention reflects the politics of economic scarcity and social conservatism, but, more importantly, it reflects persistent and deeply rooted assumptions about human abilities and the role of schools in providing equal opportunity. Neither the mood of generosity toward poor and minority children in the 1960s nor the current stinginess has altered the enduring differentiated structure of school.

Opportunity to Learn and Conceptions of Educational Equality

Focusing on the equity aspect of proposals for making opportunity-to-learn standards integral to an accountability system, this article discusses conceptual issues surrounding determination of equal educational opportunity and explores ways that these issues manifest themselves in empirical formulations of opportunity to learn (OTL). Using two databases, OTL measures are developed according to three alternative conceptions of equality—the Libertarian, Liberal, and Democratic Liberal conceptions—and the influence of these conceptions on the information provided is compared. This examination shows the intimate relation between values on equality and measures of equality and brings these issues to the fore for discussion by educators and policymakers.

Bounding the Case Within Its Context: A Constructivist Approach to Studying Detracking Reform

This article presents the story of our research teams efforts to conduct a multisite case study of 10 racially mixed schools engaged in effort to reduce ability grouping or tracking. Although the politics of education research and our own theoretical frame work told us that detracking reform is strongly influenced by the politics and norms in the local school community, we were not sure how to study a school-level change while examining the broader context of that change. We learned over the course of our study to build outward from the school site into the local community, and co-construct the boundaries of our cases with the help of our respondents. As a result, we discovered that the boundaries of each case and the differences in the shape and size of each case are as much a finding as they are a methodological consideration.

The reproduction of inequity: The content of secondary school tracking

This studys objective was to explore the relationship between tracking and educational inequality within schools. The following were addressed: how high-status knowledge and effective instruction are distributed among tracks, and how classroom relationships may differ among tracks. A cultural reproduction view of schooling was used to examine how differences which emerged may effect inequity for poor and minority students. Data were collected from students and teachers in 222 English and mathematics classes in 25 secondary schools using questionnaires, interviews, and observation. Patterns of classroom variables are described, and differences between tracks explored using discriminant analysis. The findings, providing descriptions of marked differences in classroom processes and their relationship to educational inequality have both scholarly interest and implications for schooling policy.

Critical perspectives on the organization and improvement of schooling

1 Critical Inquiry for School Renewal: Liberating Theory and Practice.- 2 A Critical Perspective on Administration and Organization in Education.- 3 An Alternative and Critical Perspective for Clinical Supervision in Schools.- 4 Reformulating the Evaluation Process.- Reflections.- 5 On Critical Theory and Educational Practice.- 6 Teaching as Reflective Practice.- Author Index.

Creating Middle Schools: Technical, Normative, and Political Considerations

A new generation of state and local middle school reformers is attempting to reconceptualize their mission to avoid past failures. Against the background of earlier thinking and failed reforms, we explore in this article the content of the new reforms, paying particular attention to how they diverge from conventional school practices, school norms, and school politics. We argue that to achieve fundamental change it will not be enough to reform existing technical practices; rather, norms of community and integration will need to replace many of the competitive, individualistic, and bureaucratic norms embedded in current practice, and existing political relations will need to be restructured to ensure that the reform process reflects a fair and democratic distribution of authority. These normative and political considerations fill out the usual technical reform picture-portraying the new middle school reforms as inherently complex, value laden, and politically loaded. We conclude with the implications of our analysis for the implementation of this ambitious and complex set of reforms.

Critical Inquiry for School Renewal: Liberating Theory and Practice

After spending at least a quarter of a century and billions of dollars on large-scale school improvement efforts, the gaps between what school professionals intend to do, what the public expects to have happen in schools, and what actually goes on in them seem to grow increasingly wider. Dissatisfaction with schools, of course, is a recurring public pastime. But, as Good-lad (1981) noted rather prophetically at the beginning of the current decade, the current surge of fault-finding has taken a more serious turn: The public school system of the United States is experiencing a series of shock waves of such proportions that it may not recover. Our school system has had troubles, real and imagined, before.… It is essential, however, to recognize the difference between yesterday’s and today’s malaise. Yesterday, the attacks usually were against the people who ran the schools—their wrongheadedness or their mindlessness—but rarely against the institution. Today, as often as not, the attacks are against the institution itself, not just those who run it. Two years later, a barrage of “commission reports” beginning with A Nation at Risk laid a litany of ills and remedies on the doorstep of American schooling. Silberman’s (1970) “crisis in the classroom” had now become a full-blown crisis of schooling

Social Movement Organizing and Equity-Focused Educational Change: Shifting the Zone of Mediation

In the first edition of this handbook, we recommended significant shifts in the way education change is understood and pursued. Specifically, we argued that reforms seeking to disrupt historic connections among race, social class, educational opportunities, and schooling outcomes are likely distorted or abandoned altogether during the implementation process. To succeed, such “equity-focused” change must move beyond conventional change to address a series of unique political and normative challenges (Oakes, Welner, Yonezawa, & Allen, 1998). A related recommendation from that earlier chapter was that the processes of formulating, adopting, and implementing include the active participation of members of less powerful communities as well as the professionals and elites who typically lead reforms. Finally, we joined many others in recommending that education leaders be held accountable for providing all students with a high-quality education and, in particular, for ensuring that the least well-off students are provided with the learning resources they need. Here too, however, we argued that the form of accountability most likely to support the implementation of equity-focused change is the accountability of policy makers and school officials to the public and, most notably, to members of marginalized groups whose educational chances depend on such reforms.