Have you noticed that some writers at the Hartford Business Journal were quickly elevated to glamorous opinion-writing slots, where they travel the globe and eat expense-account snails and write about the great issues of the day?
Other business journal writers get assigned to such stuff as reporting on the Connecticut Siting Council, which convenes really interesting meeting on where cell phone towers should go; or the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, which writes really interesting term papers on the status of women.
Yes, it’s true. I’m on the “fast track” here at the paper. Before too long, they may even name me sports editor.
The process is not good or bad, moral or immoral. No, the editors simply determine who has the aptitude to opine about everything and explain the tragedy of the Red Sox — and then that person is placed on the fast track.
The notion of tracking certain professional folks for future fame and fortune is hardly unusual. The high-flying investment banks and consulting firms are almost embarrassing in their efforts to wine, dine and coddle and “fast track” bright young things from snobby, Ivy League schools that are willing to work 304.2 hours per week for great gobs of money.
Where tracking is controversial, if not forbidden; where tracking is approved of by the troops, but not by the commanders, is in the arena of public education.
With the understandable support of generations of teachers, school systems have launched various tracking initiatives, designed in large part to ease the burden of determining how fast or how slow or how complex or how simple a curriculum should be for a diverse student population of varying abilities.
In decades past, in the larger, urban districts in particular, tracking took the form of assigning the smart, sophisticated kids into high-flying academic classes, while channeling the lesser lights into easier versions of the academic, and into such stuff as “auto repair” and “home economics.”
The law of unintended consequences kicked in, of course, and tracking became a tool by which integrated school systems could attempt to retain the upwardly mobile middle class that was beginning to escape to suburban schools.
One of the most disciplined efforts in Hartford was at the Quirk Middle School, uneasily located on the edge of a largely black neighborhood, but also serving the dwindling supply of white professionals in the city’s West End. The early 1970s tracking at Quirk was militant; many whites and blacks rarely saw each other, except at lunch and gym class.
Was this a racist conspiracy? Everyone involved would deny it. My own urban high school, 4,000 students strong in the 1960s, had rigorous tracking, even though we had few minority students. The tracking tended to separate the middle-class Jewish kids from the blue-collar sons and daughters of the nearby U.S. Steel plant.
The complicated justification, at least on the surface, was academic.
Last month, Connecticut’s State Board of Education issued a strong rant against tracking, with particular scorn heaped on Meriden, Danbury and Stamford. Think about those cities. Racial mix, socio-economic mix — and an almost irresistible itch among the wealthier populations to move to different school systems.
It’s difficult to have an honest, coherent, open discussion about tracking. Whatever the merits of the system, they are overwhelmed by fear that minorities will be, so to speak, on the wrong track.
Ironically, tracking in heavily minority schools can be a Godsend, as academically gifted and inclined students can escape peer pressure to do less well.
I have to stop now. Lunch with the publisher. I’m on the fast track.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
