Unpacking Detracking: When Progressive Pedagogy Meets Students’ Social Worlds

Despite heated debate over detracking, little research exists on how the reform plays out in the classroom. This article, based on a year-long interpretive study of a detracked ninth-grade program at a diverse urban high school, focuses on the encounter between the “official” practices of the detracked classrooms under study and the “unofficial” social worlds of the students taking part in those practices. The author describes how aspects of the overall school context framed and permeated students’ interactions in their detracked classes, at times leading to a reiteration of the very inequalities that detracking was designed to address.