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I’m firmly in favor of tracking kids. I think kids should be in some form of education through 18. I just don’t think trying to force everyone through a pre-college curriculum is good for lower achieving students. No amount of IEP and extra help is going to take a kid who reads like a first grader in ninth grade and make him capable of doing even community college work. I’m not even convinced you could take a kid with the reading comprehension and math skills of a sixth grader and get him ready for university level work. The bad thing, for them about trying to do such a thing is that basically you set his expectations far above what he can actually accomplish, so anything less than university and white collar work is beneath him, but you also fail him by not teaching him the kinds of skills he can actually use to support himself. Teach a kid with a sixth grade reading comprehension and math skills to do trade work, and he can not only support himself, but if he works hard enough might even own his own business. A kid with worse skills might not be able to do that, but maybe could do simple line cooking or manual labor or something. But if those kids try to compete with high achieving students who can leverage those skills, they’ll just end up unemployed and probably unemployable.
At the same time, those kids will slow down the education of the rest of the class to their level. The kid who’s disruptive because he doesn’t understand the concept of algebra is holding back other kids. Having the teacher repeat lessons because he can’t do them slows the class down as well. The smart kids end up never developing their skills to their potential because they’re stuck in classes with kids much dumber and the curriculum is geared to them.
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