Parenting & Family Quote by James S. Coleman

Coleman is needling a comfortable technocratic dodge: the habit of treating population-level statistics as if they were destiny for individual kids. The first clause grants the grim realism of aggregate outcomes - that many freshmen won’t end up in college. But the pivot is the point: when a school system takes that probability and bakes it into a “track” for a specific child, it isn’t forecasting the future; it’s manufacturing it.

The intent is sharply policy-facing. Coleman is warning that curricular sorting is not a neutral response to inequality but one of its most efficient delivery systems. “Designed for that 70 percent” is devastatingly bureaucratic language, a phrase that sounds like planning but reads as preemptive surrender. The subtext: institutions love risk management. They prefer to optimize for the median, protect test-score averages, and keep schedules tidy rather than tolerate the mess of open-ended aspiration. Tracking lets schools claim they’re being “realistic” while quietly rationing opportunity.

In context, this sits in Coleman’s broader preoccupation with how schooling reproduces social stratification - not only through funding, but through expectations, peer effects, and the everyday decisions that determine who gets algebra, who gets Shakespeare, who gets counseled toward AP, who gets steered elsewhere. He’s not romantic about college as a universal endpoint; he’s allergic to premature closure. The line lands because it exposes the moral sleight of hand: describing inequality is one thing. Designing for it is complicity.