6.5a Education as the Path to Achieving the American Dream?
Education beyond high school is the main way people in the United States achieve upward social mobility. However, access to higher education is stratified. Broader economic stratification also influences parental investment in activities that boost a child’s academic achievement. Overall, the U.S. education system can provide a means for achieving the America dream. However, it also reinforces inequality.
Academic Tracking
For instance, U.S. schools often use academic tracking. Academic tracking is an approach by which schools group students based on actual or perceived differences in academic ability and their future goals. Academic tracking begins as early as elementary school and continues through high school. Parents and educators believe that “those in high tracks are … enrolled in them because they are smarter and deserve to be there” (Lewis & Diamond, 2015, p. 95). Schools place students into tracks based on standardized testing, teacher recommendations, and parental advocacy (Lewis & Diamond, 2025).
Even if standardized testing is objective, teachers’ recommendations are subjective, and not all parents can advocate for their children and be taken seriously by school officials. As a result, academic tracks are racially segregated. White and Asian American students are overrepresented in college prep tracks, including honors courses and Advanced Placement (AP) Courses. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are overrepresented in general tracks (Peters et al., 2019; Irizarry, 2021). Racially diverse schools can find themselves with racially segregated classrooms because of tracking. Research on AP courses has shown that using test scores, grades, or teacher recommendations to enroll students in AP courses “disproportionately excludes Black and Hispanic students relative to White students among those with similarly low prior achievement” (Hirschl & Smith, 2023, p. 205-6).
A consequence of racially segregated classrooms that result from tracking is that they promote racist thinking among White students and teachers (Lewis & Diamond, 2015). People in the United States believe academic achievement is mostly about applying natural intelligence to hard work. This belief is translated into racist thinking that Black, Latinx, and Native American students are not as intelligent or hardworking merely because they are underrepresented in the college prep track. White and Asian American students, in turn, are stereotyped as naturally more intelligent because of their overrepresentation in college prep tracks. Tracking, therefore, reinforces racial inequality by segregating students following assumed academic differences, which then “happen” to correlate with racial categories.
Outside the Classroom Also Matters
What happens in those classrooms also matters. Achievement gaps grow between students with similar test scores who are on different tracks (Condron 2008). Lewis and Diamond (2015) find that students in general tracks receive less rigorous education than students in college prep tracks. They also note how quickly teachers and staff intervene depending on whether they perceive a child’s parents as likely to contact the school (Lewis & Diamond, 2015). In their interviews with 27 teachers and staff, the researchers found that their study participants more often viewed White parents as parents who would contact the school. Therefore, they paid more attention to White students to prevent parents from contacting them.
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Research Finds Teachers Intervene More When They Believe Parents Will Contact the School
What happens outside classrooms also perpetuates inequality. Schneider et al. (2018) studied consumer spending and time-use data to understand the relationship between social class and the amount of time and money parents spend on children. They found that social class influenced how much money parents spend on children but not how much time they spend with them. Moreover, when income inequality is high, as now, those with the most spend even more on their children, especially on extra lessons and school-related expenses (such as private-school tuition or a graphing calculator), in what the researchers called “the shadow education system.” They conclude that this spending broadens inequality among children.