By Tarice L.S. Gray

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan chose Selma, Alabama, earlier this year to address the problem of civil rights injustices in education, Rose Sanders knew why. She lives there, in that historic black community whose determination to challenge racial injustices during the civil rights movement drew the attention of the entire world.

But 20 years ago Sanders, a Harvard-educated attorney, uncovered another example of racial injustice: tracking in public schools.

Sanders’ daughter, who was in the second grade at the time, wrote a letter insisting her teacher was racist. When Sanders went to the school to investigate, she was shocked by what she learned. “I found out she was in a sub-group. In other words she was taking different classes, being judged by completely different standards,” Sanders explained. “So I asked, ‘What is this based on?’ [The teacher] said ‘test scores.’ I looked at [my daughter’s] test scores—she was scoring in the 94th percentile in the country! They had to move her from the low-level to the gifted class in two days. The law was so blatant and they were caught in the middle of it, and I guess since I’m an attorney they didn’t want to fight,” Sanders reasoned.

But Sanders did fight on for students who could not. Upon discovering that the “mistake” her daughter (now an attorney herself) experienced was actually an established practice, Sanders galvanized her community, organized protests, and was even arrested in her quest to rid Selma schools of the scholastic doctrine that justified the mis-education of black students.

Tracking in public schools began innocently enough in the 1920s in this country, an era when many high school students took jobs right after graduating and relatively few went to college. Education experts and school officials reasoned it was more practical to establish different curricula, or “tracks” that would prepare students for their likely future. Generally speaking, the tracks were set up as vocational, or trade; general, or business; and academic, or college preparatory. But in the decades since, including those since the Brown decision, tracking too often morphed from scholastic sorting to racial discrimination.

In researching the roots of tracking in the Selma schools, Sanders encountered a disturbing realization. In the late 1980s it was policy, not just practice, to deny minority students enrollment in certain subjects—including algebra. And tracking was more than a problem in the South. The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 found that a sizable majority of 8th and 10th grade students across the country were tracked. It further noted that students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, particularly blacks and Latinos, were more likely to be enrolled in lower track classes and less likely to be in upper track classes. Sanders and others say that while written policies requiring tracking no longer exist, the belief that black and Latino students are less capable of rigorous scholastic work still often exerts a powerful influence on the opportunities teachers and administrators make available to them.

A startling example of that appeared in a recent Washington Post article about one elementary school in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland. Last year the school’s faculty, which is nearly 75 percent white, identified the percent of the student body, which is about 64 percent white, likely to be considered “gifted and talented:” Forty-nine percent of white students and 67 percent of Asian students were so identified, compared to less than 8 percent of Latino students and less than 4 percent of African-American pupils.

“The Brown decision declared that separate in anything is inherently unequal,” Rose Sanders said, “but if you’re in a school building and the only thing that’s integrated is the building, and the black kids are locked out of higher academic courses and ill-prepared for tests, SAT or ACT, then you still have separate and inherent inequality.” Sanders considered the possibility of a lawsuit to force a change, but found that if students are not barred from being educated in the same building, the way in which they are educated is not a legal issue.

Nonetheless, the persistent and striking achievement gap between white and Asian pupils, on the one hand, and, on the other, black and Latino students has led some education experts and activists to believe many schools and teachers practice a de facto tracking system.

The issue has also drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Education. Secretary Arne Duncan concedes there is something disturbing about the trend of underachievement in the black community. In his March 8 speech  in Selma, he quoted President Obama’s words that , “We still haven’t fixed them 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education … [T]he inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.”

A July 2009 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (PDF), determined that white students on average scored at least 26 points higher than black students in every subject, on a 0-500 scale.

While she knows the statistics, Sanders believes the core issue is not an achievement gap. “It’s an access gap, preparation. If you don’t have access to the information how in the world do you expect our kids to compete with those who have access and the preparation?”

Daria Hall, director of Policy K-12 with The Education Trust, which promotes high academic achievement for all students at all levels, makes the same point. “It’s an opportunity gap that creates an achievement gap. We take these students who we know are coming to school [less prepared than their peers], and give them less of every single thing that matters. As a result, they achieve at lower levels.”

Hall contends that tracking, by denying many black and Latino students access to a richer, more challenging curriculum, is a major cause of this educational injustice. The data her organization has collected on algebra helps explain why African-American students today are facing the same challenges as those decades before.

Nationally, just 19 percent of African-American 8th graders are enrolled in algebra classes, compared to 45 percent of white students. Even more alarming, only 35 percent of high-performing black fifth-grade students go on to enroll in algebra, compared to 63 percent of high-performing white students. “That tells us quite clearly that, regardless of academic aptitude or preparation, tracking is going in our schools,” Hall said.

Along with the much-touted educational achievement gap, tracking leads to lowered expectations and decreased standards in schools and communities nationwide. Mike Casserly, head of the Council for Greater City Schools, saw the connection between educational injustices fueled by tracking, and the results of a Council study on the state of young black males. The publication, Call for Change: The social and educational factors contributing to the outcomes of black males in urban schools (PDF), issued in October of this year, revealed that black male students nationally scored an average of 104 points lower than white males on the SAT college entrance exam in reading. Additionally, black students overall were a third less likely to meet ACT college reading benchmarks than their white counterparts.

These findings aren’t new, Casserly explained. But people aren’t paying attention like they should. “At a point where the country is struggling to maintain its pre-eminence economically, the fact that we are squandering so much of our talent is counterproductive and self-destructive as a country.”

Thanks to increased awareness of and commitment to addressing the so-called minority achievement gap and the many educational dynamics that perpetuate unequal education, there are glimmers of hope. Hall’s organization is championing the movement toward The Common Core State Standards—a set of standards for K-12 students that was developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, to provide a clear and consistent educational preparation that’s appropriate for children to be college bound and join the workforce. This includes introducing algebraic thinking in the fifth grade. So far, around 40 states have pledged to adopt these college-and-career-ready standards.

Hall maintains that because the concept of tracking, albeit not spoken of as such, continues to be so ingrained in public schooling, advocates, parents and students must intensify their efforts to eradicate this inequity. Rose Sanders remains committed to the fight. As she puts it, our children are too important to believe the historical “lie” that they are academically inferior. “When they see white kids come into a system or they see them across town and they’re getting what you’re not getting, what are you saying to that child? ‘You’re not as good, you’re not as smart.’ But once they see the greatness inside of them, the rest is history.”

Tarice L.S. Gray is a freelance writer and blogger with GrayCurrent.com.