cluding challenging and meaningful curriculum, engaging instruction, and high teacher expectations -- to students who already have the greatest academic, economic, and social advantages This having been said, I found my high school experiences to be much different than that. I attended a primarily middle-class school in Sacramento, CA, with students from every conceivable culture and background. We had several different tracking programs in our school: a special education program for mentally-disabled students, the standard curriculum high-school education, an International Studies program, and the International Baccalaureate program, which is essentially equivalent to any honors or advanced placement education. Given the many facets of my school, I never once got the impression that students were being discriminated against on basis of ability. All students, including my friends, were given ample opportunity to pursue any education they saw fit. Students were never told they couldnt take a specific class or participate in a program. While I wont claim that resentment or jealousy towards students in the higher-level programs was nonexistent, I will state that it was almost nonexistent. In my higher level classes, I was enabled to study in areas not normally offered in a high school learning environment. I completed my first year Calculus course my junior year, and was able to move on to higher levels of math, taught by the chair of the math department at California State University Sacramento, Professor Etterbeek. With this opportunity, I was able to take my education to a new plateau, and it was choices such as this that afforded me a formidable education. These challenges would not otherwise have been available to me in a non-tracked or fully inclusive learning environment.Another opportunity was actually a requirement to garner the International Baccalaureate Diploma . One component of the Diploma was the successful completion of the...
