Both the opportunities and self-esteem of children in lower tracks are stifled. They too often accept and seek their inferior status, even when the system gives them an illusory choice. Decades, generations of lessening the self-esteem of a people is deadly and destructive to the human spirit, to the conception of self, to the will to achieve. Unlike the past, the oppression is hidden, the enemy is invisible, and the rebellion is directed inwards. Consequently, the results of tracking is helping to create rising tides of violence, crime, drug abuse, child abuse, teen pregnancy, high dropout rates, low test scores, underemployment and unemployment, poverty and misery.
Tracking is a road to social disaster.
Our children, our society are being dehumanized and demoralized. When the highest court in the land reinforces that status, the results are devastating. If any race of people had experienced the same degradation, oppression, and inferior education as African Americans, a cycle of poverty and crime would encase them all. While there has been a litigation movement aimed at integrating the schools, there never has been a Civil Rights Movement around the issue of public education in this nation. We have struggled and died for equal toilets and lunch counters, the right to sit where we want on public conveyances and the right to vote, but never have we put it all on the line for the right of our children to be humanely and decently educated.