School-Life Navigation: Surviving the Tracking

By: Edrees Saied

For students of color, school can be a pathless land. A land covered with a very thin layer of ice that breaks and swallows you when you make a wrong step.

Being the only one in my family that can take my education to the next level, I’ve felt like a lone wanderer.

Everyone I grew up with either works in a liquor store, is working for someone they don’t even like, was married before they even got a chance to live on their own, or has abandoned their dreams. I’ve begun drifting further away from my cousins just because our paths are starting to diverge.

And no, I don’t have a private advisor. No, I don’t have parents that are all into my school life. No, I don’t have anyone in my family who has made it up the mountain I’m climbing towards. I had to figure it out!

Between the sixth and ninth grade, school felt very foreign.
Most of the time, I didn’t get a say in what classes I got and on the rare occasion I did have options, I didn’t understand the difference nor the way that selection would impact my education options down the line.

While I was too busy being confused, everyone else was enrolling in the Paideia program, taking HP Chemistry, or applying for other academies I knew nothing about. No one wanted to give me information about all these things, or even encourage me to take some of the advanced classes.

That’s the thing; school wasn’t designed to be straight-forward. If it was, then we would see higher success rates from groups like the African American community, which holds the majority in lower level classes at my school.

What angers me even more is the data in my research, showing that “for those at the bottom, the effects of tracking produce slower and slower rates of learning and smaller and smaller chances of receiving [assignments to higher level classes]”(Alternatives to Tracking).

As a student who has been stuck in lower level classes for most of his school life, I can say that, once I forced myself into advanced classes, I was a much slower learner than other folks in the room. School felt ever more foreign. But as I kept pushing and climbing up the ladder, I was competing with the top students in my classes.

To succeed in school as a student of color, you must take the initiative. You can’t waver for a second. You can’t lose focus. You have to fight to find people who can help you navigate through the system.

Become the agent, not the spectator.