“Tracking” in schools, or the practice of segregating students by “ability”, has long been an issue of debate among educators and researchers alike. As shown in Off-Track, the practice of tracking raises fundamental educational questions about how we define intelligence and who we deem to be intelligent. The setting of the video is an untracked World Literature course in suburban Montclair High School in New Jersey. Michelle Fine, professor of psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, points out, “We don’t need public education to reproduce social, class and race discrepancies. We’ve got a larger society that’s more than happy to do that. The task of public education is to interrupt those discrepancies and create a broader set of opportunities for everybody.”
