The Reproduction of Inequity: The Content of Secondary School Tracking leannie Oakes Jeannie Oakes, Labora- tory in School and Community Education, Graduate School of Education, UCLA. This research, funded in part by grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Kettering Foundation, was con- ducted under the auspices of A Study of Schooling, Gradu- ate School of Educa- tion, University of California, Los Angeles. This study's objective was to explore the relationship between tracking and educational inequality within schools. The following were addressed: how high-status knowledge and effective instruction are distributed among tracks, and how classroom relationships may differ among tracks. A cul- tural reproduction view of schooling was used to examine how differ- ences which emerged may effect inequity for poor and minority students. Data were collected from students and teachers in222 English and mathe. matics classes in 25 secondary schools using questionnaires, interviews, and observation. Patterns of classroom variables are described, and differences between tracks explored using discriminant analysis. The findings, providing descriptions of marked differences in classroom processes and their relation- ship to educational inequality have both scholarly interest and implications for schooling policy. Tracking has been an almost universal practice in American secondary schools for the last 80 years. The view that tracking eases the instructional difficulties teachers face in working with diverse student groups and the belief that students learn better in classes where they are grouped with others of similar aptitudes and achievement levels have had wide acceptance. The extensive body of research on tracking and student achievement, however, has not borne out this latter belief. Much of the work in this area has been inconclusive. Indeed, the cumulative evidence has not supported the claim that homogeneous grouping enhances student learning. (See among many others Findley and Bryan, 1970; Persell, 1976.) However, considerable work on noncognitive student outcomes associated with tracking has found that placement in low-track classes has had substantial negative effects on stu- dents, including lowered self-concepts and aspirations and increased de- linquency and misbehavior. (See Schafer andOlexa, 1971; Heyns, 1974; Kelly, 1974, 1975; Alexander, Cook, and McDill, 1978; Rosenbaum, 1976, 1980; and others.) These findings take on a special significance in that poor and minority students have been consistently found in disproportionately large percentages in the lowest tracks in secondary schools. (Among many others see Schafer and Olexa, 1971 ; Rosenbaum,1976; Alexander and Eck- land, 1975; Hauser et al., 1976; Metz, 1978.) Tracking, therefore, has been The Urban Review Vol. 14, No. 2, 1982 © 1982 Agathon Press, Inc. 0042-0972/82/020107-1451.50 107