Tracking and the Educational Spiral: Arab and Jewish Patterns of Educational Expansion

Abstract

The Israeli system of secondary education consists of two separate subsystems. Jewish secondary education maintains an elaborate system of tracking with over half of all students attending non-college-bound tracks. In contrast, the Arab system is predominantly academic and college bound in curriculum. This study compares patterns of educational expansion for Arabs and Jews across recent birth cohorts. I demonstrate that tracking can enable an expansion of secondary education while, at the same time, alleviating expansionary pressures from the tertiary system. Educational attainment rates have increased substantially in most societies over the century. Several explanations for the expansion of educational systems have been proposed.' First, according to the technofunctional account, schooling was or is expanded in response to two important social needs: the growing industrial demand for technical and skilled labor and the growing societal need for a socialized, normatively integrated populace.2 The integrative function of schooling is most pronounced in immigrant societies where schools are entrusted with the responsibility of desocializing and resocializing the immigrants into the value and normative systems of the host society.3 Similarly, the neo-Marxist accounts argue that schooling may be expanded in response to capitalism's needs for a docile and skilled labor force.4 Schooling also serves to legitimate social inequalities in that it presumes to select and promote students on the basis of ability and merit. The expansion of primary and then secondary schooling in the United States is said to have been a response to the changing and growing needs of capitalism.