Powell

"Stratification research repeatedly demonstrates the critical roles that educational institutions play as they sort students at early ages into pathways through school that differ in their access to later educational and employment opportunities.

Mobility within social structure determines individuals' successes and failures, while 'modes of access to positions in social structures...determine how individual efforts and abilities become linked to social and economic rewards', affecting individual beliefs about the relationship between personal efforts and achievements (Sorensen 1986: 178).

Education not only determines societal patterns of economic and political allocation, but also legitimates such patterns. School systems distribute each cohort of children into a society's adult stratification system (see Kerckhoff 1995)"

"Universal compulsory education led schools to develop a variety of sorting mechanisms. Especially during the resulting transitions within an educational system's learning opportunity structures, special educational needs are identified, labelled and categorical boundaries drawn around dis/ability altering individuals' trajectories. By stigmatizing, separating, and segregating students, special education institutions in Germany and the United States construct social inequality."

"Increasingly, all students are expected to master a common curriculum to meet national and state standards (Farkas 1996: 79 94). At the same time, teachers differentiate curricula according to a variety of educational interests, abilities, and needs (Heubert and Hauser 1999). However, most research shows that tracking increases variation in student performance between groups without altering the average higher tracks gain more than the lower due to cumulative dis/advantages from track placement (Kerckhoff 1995: 328).

Studies of tracking suggest that we do change children's academic intelligence all the time. The entire process of tracking is designed to do just that... By these practices schools demonstrate the pliability of cognitive skills as well as the powerful effect social factors have on the success of individuals. Policies alter intelligence (Fischer et al. 1996: 167).

Elementary schools sort students in three ways being held back, being placed in special education, and being grouped for instruction by administrative decision. These in school tracks are more difficult to analyze precisely because they are 'so far below the level of social consciousness that they are not even thought of as tracks' (Entwisle et al. 1997: 80). Entwisle, Alexander and Olson argue forcefully for a focus on children at very early ages, because 'rigid social stratification begins when children start their formal schooling, or even before, yet much of the social sorting at this point in life is overlooked' (1997: 4). Their longitudinal Beginning School Study found that boys, minority group members, and poor children are more likely to fail a grade or be placed in special education classes in elementary school".

"While categories of dis/ability have been continuously revised (most recently due to disability critiques of the medical model), the categories and processes of classification resist change. Similar to other Western bureaucratic administrations run by professional gatekeepers, special education and its classification systems based on the ideology of 'normalcy' derived from statistical science (Davis 1997) developed at the nexus of the modern social sciences, industrializing nation-states, and social policies (Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1996: 310). Defining mental, physical and intellectual 'normalcy' and assessing populations has become a preoccupation of nation states and international organizations alike (Marks 1999: 53)".

Justin J.W. Powell