Grouping and teaching students by ability has been an accepted practice, particularly in middle-grade and high schools, since the turn of the century. But as more and more research suggests this sifting of students may have negative effects, particularly on average and below-average students, the practice of tracking is being questioned.
In a report last year on middle schools, the Carnegie Corp. of New York, a philanthropic foundation that studies education issues, called tracking one of the most divisive and damaging of school practices.
”Time and time again, young people placed in lower academic tracks or classes are locked into dull, repetitive instructional programs leading at best to minimum competencies,” the report stated.
”The psychic numbing these youth experience from a `dumbed-down`
curriculum contrasts with the exciting opportunities for learning and critical thinking that students in the higher tracks or classes may experience.”
The report also acknowledged what many teachers in tracked systems are quick to confirm: Being on a track other than the ”bright” track is often devastating to a student`s sense of self-worth and identity. Students are quick to discover how they are tracked and to judge themselves as smart or dumb on that basis.
What`s more, some educators argue, teachers often have lower expectations of students in the average to lower tracks. These students readily internalize their teachers` low expectations and fulfill the prophecy of limited or lack of academic success.
But trying to change established practices doesn`t come easily. In fact, the practice is so firmly a part of American education that it is seldom challenged, said Jeannie Oakes, an associate professor of education at UCLA and author of the book, ”Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality”
(Yale University Press, 1985).
The assumptions behind tracking-which Oakes` research disputes-are the ideas that students learn best when grouped with students of similar abilities, that less-capable children suffer in the presence of more-talented students and that tracking placements are accurate and fair.
Donald Driver, who retired in June as principal of Lincoln Junior High School in Mt. Prospect, led his staff into accepting more heterogeneous groups. He compares the difficulties of changing tracked to non-tracked classes with doing major surgery.
Like many of tracking`s critics, Driver contended that his school was identifying students prematurely with labels that they would find difficult to shake later in their academic careers. He says he believes such labels compromise students` opportunities for academic success.
On the basis of other educators` research and his 17 years at the school, Driver concluded that average and below-average students were missing opportunities in education while the so-called bright ones were being offered a not altogether realistic picture of themselves.
”The honors group in junior high school easily becomes an elitist group,” he said. ”The average group loses some of the modeling and motivation to learn if the cream is always skimmed off. Those who remain don`t have models of high interest, high motivation and high achievement. They`re stereotyped as less than successful at too early an age.”
”The biggest nut to crack is honors,” said Larry Chase, executive director of the Northwest Educational Cooperative, a Des Plaines-based organization of school districts in the northwest suburbs formed to improve the quality of education. The cooperative has worked with Driver to help implement the changes at Lincoln.
Parents of students who have been tagged as gifted worry that their children will be held back in their learning if grouped with ”slower”
children, he said.
”The research contradicts that, but that doesn`t make it any easier to explain to the parent who thinks (mixed-ability classes are) compromising his kid`s chances of getting into Harvard,” Chase said.
”There`s a very strong push, especially by parents, for separate classes throughout elementary and secondary schools,” said James Mahan, superintendent of Homewood School District 153, which oversees that south suburban community`s kindergarten through 8th grades.
Mahan`s district, which offers heterogeneously grouped classes through 6th grade, is ”gradually moving away from strictly homogeneous groupings by ability into heterogeneous groupings in (7th- and 8th-grade) language arts and math,” he said.
In the 1960s, educators first recognized that the bottom 2 percent of the school population was very different from the general school population, and special-education programs were developed for them. Shortly thereafter, some educators concluded that the needs of the brightest students also weren`t being met, and gifted programs were created, Oakes said.
Although there is some symmetry to the argument that the top 2 percent also requires special attention, Oakes insists the logic is flawed and has resulted in bad public policy.
”We`re now pulling out the top 5 to 10 percent for special programs when, in fact, these kids are not so different from the rest of the students. They are not like the people in the bottom 2 percent who often have physiological brain disorders that affect their learning.”
Once gifted programs are created, giving real advantages to their participants, the parents of children in these programs are loathe to see them disappear, she said. ”But the kinds of activities that go on in gifted programs-wonderful enrichment learning like going on field trips to the theater-are things that all children could profit from.”
”If we`re ever going to break away from homogeneous grouping we`ve got to prove that students can learn just as much in those arrangements,” Chase said. ”And that means we`ve got to use more powerful methods of teaching.”
Among the teaching methods that often come up in discussions of non-tracked classes are team teaching, cooperative learning (in which students of various abilities work as a team to solve a problem or perform a task) and mastery learning, a strategy developed by Benjamin Bloom at the University of Chicago.
Mastery learning assumes that all children can learn a subject if given enough time to do so and provides specially designed materials and ways to offer more instruction time for those students who need it.
At Baker Demonstration School, the laboratory school of National-Louis University in Evanston, cooperative learning is an important part of the preschool-through-8th-grade heterogeneously arranged classes.
”When you take the gifted child out, you`re not only affecting the gifted but the average child as well,” said Lynn McCarthy, director of the school. ”Studies have shown that the average child working with more-gifted children makes better progress than when left only with average learners.
”But we`re not setting up our gifted students as sacrificial lambs either,” she continued. Many studies also suggest that the gifted student does well whether placed in a mixed-ability or same-ability classroom.
The case for mixed-group teaching has social implications. ”It`s the way the world is,” said Eva Helwing, principal of Inter-American School, a bilingual Chicago public elementary magnet school on the North Side.
In Chicago, public schools track in academic classes at the high school level, and there are special elementary schools for the gifted.
Although Horace Mann called public school ”the great equalizer,”
researchers have found that in the tracking process the odds of being placed in higher-level classes are not the same for all students.
”When children get sorted, it`s almost always poor and minority children who wind up at the bottom,” said Joan McCarty First, executive director of the National Coalition of Advocates for Students, based in Boston.
Citing 1986 U.S. Department of Education statistics, the coalition says that black students are twice as likely as white students to be labeled as educably mentally retarded, while white students are more than twice as likely to be placed in gifted and talented programs.
Arguments also are made by many educators that the most talented and experienced teachers often teach the ”brightest” children.
Many teachers prefer teaching tracked classses, particularly for the gifted student, Oakes said. At Lincoln Junior High, it has been difficult for a veteran staff, accustomed to teaching by ability level, to teach mixed-ability classes, Driver said. For example, before the introduction of nontracked classes, his science staff previously might have had to prepare a single activity for a given day; last year they had to come up with a range of challenging activities for students at different levels of ability.
But asking more of teachers is something Driver and other educators opposed to tracking believe is necessary for equal education. There is something inherently unfair, they say, about attaching labels to adolescents just at the time they are developing their self-concepts.
”Many of us at the junior high and high school levels have encouraged tracking because it`s easier to teach when classes are grouped by ability,”
Driver said. ”But that`s not a valid reason.”
