Jaylen Brown still remembers the tears hitting the page.
Brown, then an incoming freshman at Cal Berkeley, was reading “Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality’’ by Jeannie Oakes.
Oakes explains how publicly defining and separating students by their apparent intellectual capabilities generates damaging and unfair consequences. As Brown combed through terms such as social stratification (the system of categorizing people based on socioeconomic factors) and curricular tracking (the practice of grouping students based on their perceived ability), he couldn’t help but cry.
Learning concepts in high school that don’t apply to the real world wasn’t a coincidence, he realized.