DETRACKING AMERICA SCHOOLS - EQUITY AT ZERO COST

Schools across the country ave ending the practice of grouping student s based on ability, in part, because of research indicating that track ing hurts low-ability students without helping students ts of other ab ility levels. Using a nationally representative survey conducted by th e National Center for Education Statistics, (NCES) we reexamine the im pact of tracking on high school student achievement through the estima tion of a standard education production function. This approach allows us to control for the possibility that track is correlated with facto rs such as class size and teacher education. In addition, we address t he possibility that there are unobserved student or school characteris tics that affect both achievement and track placement. Our results ind icate that abolishing tracking in America's schools would have a large positive impact on achievement for students currently in the lower tr acks, but that this increase in achievement would come at the expense of students in upper-track classes.