Oakes- "Tracking"

Tracking in schools is an awful thing to do to students. Oakes speaks about the problems with dividing the students into different groups based on there intelligence levels and skill levels. This is giving bigger advantages to students in these higher skilled groups and disadvantages to the students in the lower skilled groups. When what should be happening is that all students should be receiving the same work and the ones who struggle just get a little more help so they can understand the lessons. No students should be left behind. 

This article to me connects to Collier a little bit because Collier says that teachers need to embrace and honor a students first language choice. So they need to give them help so they can learn at the same pace as the other students. This relates to Oakes because students need to learn the same stuff together and not separate. If students who had trouble speaking english were ignored then they would never learn anything. So why should kids be placed in separate groups based on skill? They all need equal opportunity, no matter what language they speak first or there skill level. 

This article also connects to Christensen a little because Christensen talks about how students need the right tools from schools to interpret the media and other cultural texts. It relates to Oakes because if students in higher skill groups in school have better tools than lower level groups, then it isn't fair to the students in the lower level groups. So what I'm trying to say is that all students need the same tools to learn the same stuff equally.

This is how this article by Oakes relates to these two other authors.

Here's a video that relates to this topic.