Tracking was created in the 1900s to socialize working-class students for factory jobs

Evidence

The separation of students into different tracks has a 100-year history in the U.S. that is directly connected to the rise of intelligence testing as well as specific developments in our industrial history. In the early 1900s business leaders wanted to bring working-class students into the high schools so they could be socialized for factory work, but these leaders didn’t believe that working class students could do the academic curriculum, and they certainly didn’t want to raise the expectations of working class students that they could aspire to professional jobs. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1022

Categorization

• XREF: Intelence-testing’s founding purpose connects to the meritocracy myth critique in later chapters.