You are an AI assistant.
system
Should mathematics curricula abolish accelerated tracks in order to address racial achievement gaps?
user
Accelerated math tracks are not the cause of racialized score gaps; they are one of the places where capitalist social relations—residential segregation, labor-market inequality, under-funded schools, and the ubiquitous “gifted” screening industry—show up in sharpest relief.  Eliminating the track without first smashing the material bases of those gaps simply collapses the indicator while leaving the disease intact.  The practical result is a ceiling lowered onto working-class kids of every nationality, while the bourgeoisie continues to buy enrichment outside the public system.  

What is needed is not administrative erasure of differences in preparation, but a dual approach:  

1.  Equalize the inputs.  Guarantee every school the same per-pupil budget, abolish the local property-tax straitjacket, institute free meals, health clinics, after-school tutoring, and summer STEM programs in the oppressed-nationality neighborhoods that imperialism has historically under-invested in.  Teacher training must include political education so that “low expectations” rooted in national oppression are systematically fought.  

2.  Democratize acceleration.  Replace the private-market pipeline (expensive prep courses, legacy admissions to “gifted” programs) with school-site committees of teachers, parents, and students that can grant access to higher-level coursework based on multiple measures—including teacher recommendation, portfolio work, and struggle-session style review that confronts rather than replicates bias.  Make accelerated courses the default at the point when mastery is demonstrated, not when tuition is paid.  

Until the dictatorship of the proletariat can guarantee those material and democratic conditions, any blanket abolition of advanced tracks functions primarily as a morale-saving device for liberal administrators, not as a step toward liberation.  The task is to raise the bottom and the top simultaneously, not to lower the ceiling so the room looks flatter.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should mathematics curricula abolish accelerated tracks in order to address racial achievement gaps?
user