Legal Rights, Local Wrongs.

Associate Professor of Education Leadership, Oakland University, Rochester, Mich.

In Legal Rights, Local Wrongs, author Kevin Welner advocates for detracking education for legal and moral reasons.

Welner, an assistant professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former attorney, builds on the early research about the abuses of tracking developed by Jeannie Oakes and others to demonstrate that tracking, at least as it is commonly used, is unfair and ineffective in helping all students succeed.

The author examines tracking in four districts that were legally charged with deliberate segregation of the kind Welner calls a Type II challenge (segregation within a school but not districtwide): Woodland Hills, Pa.; San Jose, Calif., Rockford, Ill.; and Wilmington, Del.

Welner, though a conscientious scholar and a principled educator, shapes some arguments to suit his thesis. He asserts that parents want their children in high-track classes because they feel that "merit deserves reward." He devotes a whole chapter to denigrating the values of appeals court judges who disagreed with detracking orders of lower courts. The author also seems quick to declare success for detracking, even though the new classroom organization in these districts permitted only testimonial data regarding its efficacy, not all of it positive.

However, the book offers compelling data to show that lower-track classes can have as much academic variability as higher-track classes, that teachers do not challenge remedial students to catch up to their peers, that assignment to a track usually becomes a permanent placement with negative lifelong consequences and that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately victimized by the process of tracking.

Welner offers a fair and nuanced analysis of the political, pedagogical and human problems involved in detracking.

(Legal Rights, Local Wrongs: When Community Control Collides with Educational Equity by Kevin G. Welner, State University of New York Press, 90 State St., Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207, 2001, 315 pp., $81.50 hardcover, $27.95 softcover)