In our society, there are three basic brackets we all fall into: the lower, the middle and the upper class. These categories decide whether we’ll be flipping burgers, building the place where the burgers are flipped or owning the place where they’re flipped. It may also determine the kind of education we’re going to get.

Wait, don’t we live in the land of equal opportunity, a country where no child gets left behind? Well they won’t be left behind, but they may have to take the short bus to get to school.

In our schools, an epidemic has swept through the nation. This isn’t the quaint small-town America we’ve all seen in the movies. This is a cutthroat, no-holds-barred kind of educational system, where the smart ones get ahead and stay ahead – while all the other students take a back seat and watch as their classmates acquire the tools to excel in our society.

This epidemic has disguised itself as Advanced Placement courses, honors programs, remedial courses and special education. It can also be called “tracking.” Schools implement a system that supposedly divides students based on their academic abilities. A student’s socioeconomic status also gets taken into account when deciding which track to be placed in.

Tracking is broken down into three basic categories: the slower kids, the middle-of-the-pack kids and the smart kids.

Assistant professor of teacher education Kim Bancroft said there is a disparity in the quality of education children receive based on these categories.

“What happens in schools that are half-urban/half-suburban: You’ve got the black kids in the lower-level classes, the Latinos in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes and the white kids in the AP British literature class. Therefore you’ve got all of these tracks going through school and you kind of end up being tracked in your life later than that,” Bancroft said. This kind of division can create animosity between the different levels of students. It can exacerbate the differences in the clearly drawn lines of our society and reinforce the feeling of separation between the classes. That separation, however, is needed to ensure quality in the classroom. Take, for example, a baseball team. When putting together a team, you try to avoid having a huge gap of talent between the players. You do this because the worst players could impede the success of the best players. The coach would end up spending all his time helping the bad players catch up and the average players would fall in the middle somewhere. When you have that much disparity in one place, nobody succeeds.

This separation is part of the problem, too. Schools have advanced classes to push the smarter kids, normal classes to keep the average kids going and remedial classes to help improve the slower kids. But all of this separation breeds social and educational inequality.

Sociology professor Charles Varano points out how tracking reinforces pre-existing class differences in society.

“If equality is a value we uphold, it would seem to me that everything we know about tracking contributes to inequality. The bottom line is the middle and upper classes tend to be tracked high and the lower-working classes tracked low. It’s not as ability-based as proponents claim,” Varano said.

There are other solutions to tracking, such as differentiated education, which tailors lesson plans to individual children. The problem with this is that such an overwhelming project is hard to accomplish effectively.

Maybe tracking isn’t the problem, though. Maybe the real problem lies in the inequalities already present in our society. The problem is, when you’re fighting an eight-headed monster, which head do you cut off first?

Matt Rascher can be reached at [email protected]