Welner, Kevin G.
Researchers: Kevin G. Welner
University Affiliation: University of Colorado at Boulder
Email: welner@colorado.edu
Research Question:
Explores the normative and political difficulties experienced by racially diverse schools that are implementing detracking reform.
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: State University of New York Press
Journal Entry: N/A
Year: 2010
Findings:
- African American and Latino students were disproportionately placed in low track classes that encompassed a wide range of measured abilities, causing these students to have to overcome great odds to move up within the tracked structure.
- Each year, African American and Latino students fell further and further behind their high-tracked counterparts.
- When combined with track placement, race becomes a direct predictor of lower test scores.
- Low track classes have a detrimental impact on students’ later academic performance.
- African American and Latino students are disproportionately taking these low track courses, even after controlling for prior achievement.
- Short-term achievement gains or detriments from placement in a detracted class were on a very small scale, as opposed to a high or low tracked class.
- Detracking improves school benefits for low-income and minority students.
- Detracking did not present a significant overall disadvantage to the formerly high tracked students.
- Detracking forced teachers to rethink their teaching strategies and learn to teach to mixed classrooms, although it did not solve uneven teaching.
- The “zone of mediation” is a tool to bring the issues of a) political conflict over resources that are perceived to be scarce and b) an ideological conflict over societal values and beliefs as they are acted out in schools.
- The boundaries of the zone of mediation are shaped by forces originating at societal and global levels, recognizing that while each school is unique, it is ultimately defined by a myriad of normative, political, technical, and inertial forces at the local, regional, national, and global levels.
- While the zone of mediation does define the boundaries of community tolerance, it concomitantly defines the boundaries of the mediation process within schools – those boundaries being largely created by people negotiating among themselves and between themselves and outside forces.
- The boundaries are also dependant on the perception or standpoint of individuals.
- The use of the zone of mediation in the model prompts an examination of individual forces and their mediation on the local context of an issue, allowing a reasoned prediction of how certain schools and school systems may decide on specific topics.