Let's Talk About Tracking

Whether it’s human nature or a sort of performance of open-mindedness, there’s little that policy analysts seem to enjoy more than renouncing past views now considered to be misguided. So it is with “tracking,” the practice of categorizing students into different categories related to their presumed future prospects. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember that some kids in high school were always in the Honors or AP courses, others were in general courses, and some who “worked with their hands” or were considered “not college material” were shunted into vocational tracks.

This was usually more than a little racist, not to mention staggeringly presumptuous: imagine someone in the 1950s or the decades that followed thinking they understood the potential of a 14 year old well enough to dictate their future course. It also devalued vocational education, at least until its rebranding as career and technical education really took hold, and at the other end probably pushed a lot of young people into “a college track” when that might not have been their preferred option.

Tracking seemed dead and buried, but it’s come up recently in some surprising contexts. I was more or less accused of it in a recent LinkedIn comments thread a couple weeks ago, and then I heard NYU’s Angie Kamath, who’s probably our greatest living New York-based workforce thinker and doer,1 talking about it on the most recent episode of the NYC Workforce Drop podcast.2

As to why this might be on people’s minds, it could have something to do with how much more information is suddenly available to us to help support students and other young people.3 It’s now possible to get a fairly complete picture of a young person’s academic journey, including attendance and performance, as well as their extracurricular and work-based learning experiences, and assessments from teachers and other responsible adults very quickly and easily. The most advanced application of this in New York City is the Portal, developed by New Visions for Public Schools.

Yesterday in City & State, New York City Council Member Althea Stevens4 offered praise for the Portal and condemnation of a Mamdani administration proposal to cut funding for it:

The city runs extraordinary programs through the Administration for Children’s Services, Department of Youth and Community Development, Department of Homeless Services, our public schools, CUNY and dozens of nonprofit partners. Each of those agencies is full of people who care deeply about the children they serve. The problem has never been the people. The problem is that the systems they work in cannot see each other.

I see the cost of this every day in my district. A young person in foster care whose school doesn’t know they have a caseworker. A family in a shelter whose children’s attendance pattern is invisible to the staff who could help. A high school senior eligible for a CUNY College Now course no one ever told her about. A teenager who participated in a Summer Youth Employment Program last year and whose school has no idea the experience could count toward a graduation pathway. Tens of thousands of these gaps, every year, all of them invisible until the consequences arrive – a missed graduation, a delayed referral, a benefit that went unclaimed, a young person who ended up in a system no one wanted them in.

…

I am arguing that when a partnership with a mission-driven nonprofit produces what the Portal has produced – connecting agencies that have never been connected before, at a fraction of what an internal build would cost, with philanthropic dollars covering much of the bill – the city should treat it as exactly what it is: critical public infrastructure worth protecting and expanding.

The City Council and the Mamdani administration will soon make important decisions about where to invest in the children and families of this city. We will talk about youth employment, afterschool programs, foster care, mental health and the universal childcare promise the mayor has made central to his agenda. None of those investments will work as well as they should if the agencies delivering them can still not see each other’s work.

I’m genuinely curious why the administration is proposing to cut funding for the Portal. Years ago, I heard that some people inside the Department of Education were uncomfortable with an outside organization having built the tool and wanted to develop their own. That struck me as foolish and wasteful at the time, and still does. But it’s sadly representative of a phenomenon that’s fairly common within government:5 a sense that nothing can be trusted unless it is owned and controlled.

The most valid objection I can imagine—which brings us back to tracking—is that there’s real downside risk in having all that information available so easily. For one thing, a constant and entirely valid concern within city government is inadvertently exposing undocumented immigrants to federal authorities that would gleefully deport them. But it’s also disturbingly easy to imagine our would-be tech overlords taking all of this information and feeding it into an algorithm that would dictate the life paths of countless young people whose families have limited economic resources.6 If you’re thinking about what technofeudalism might really look like, this sure seems to fit.

I fear the tech broligarchy enough, and trust them so little, that this objection resonates with me. But in the end it sort of feels like inventing fire and then not using it because one might get burned. It’s within our control to protect data privacy and dictate the purposes for which it can be used.

If the Portal enables a provider with NYC’s Summer Youth Employment Program to learn that a newly enrolled participant took a sequence of courses in a high school CTE auto maintenance program, and that provider has a relationship with a local auto repair shop looking for extra hands, that’s probably a better result than sending the participant to work at the nearest CVS. Even better if the profile includes notes that the participant has challenges related to transportation, or needs improvement on their communication skills, or is exceptionally creative—these are all pieces of information that can lead to a more rewarding customized work experience.

Ultimately, information in the hands of well trained and conscientious adults enables us to create more valuable experiences for young people that build their skills, networks, and resilience. It’s a potential Great Equalizer, a tool to help young people and their families make meaning from disparate experiences if and when they might not have the resources—money, time, connections—to do so on their own.

As I remember well from every time I tried to build system infrastructure within government, it’s not costless or frictionless. Humans need to enter the info and make sure it’s valid, and systems must be compatible and build in necessary safeguards. Someone needs to maintain it, and adults must be responsible for understanding data as a tool to find answers rather than the answer itself.

But it’s a powerful tool, and to leave it on the shelf either from concern about misuse or as yet another sacrifice on the altar of “labor market individualism”—the idea that everyone should figure it out on their own, without any recognition of how that just perpetuates generational inequality—would be a terrible and immoral choice.