Professional Opinions on Tracking in Public Schools: Benefits, Drawbacks, and Alternatives

[Eric Kursman]

Hello! My name is Eric Kursman, and I am a secondary education student teacher at the University of Michigan. In one of my educational classes, my peers and I are researching the hot topic of tracking and how it helps or hurts students in the public school system. Seeing as how we do not yet have personal experience with tracking in real-time situations, we would love to hear any and all opinions, positive or negative, about your expeiences and opinions regarding tracking or "ability grouping" at the high school level. We look forward to hearing eveyrything you have to say!

[Mike]

Hi Eric... welcome aboard and welcome to the profession. You are coming in at very interesting times!!!

I must tell you that your question did cause a smile and a thought.... this topic has been kicked around since i started teaching over 25 years ago:)

Here is what i see as i visit high schools ( and lately more and more middle schools ) in NJ.

Most high schools track although that word is not used. They do it by differentiating there courses:
College Prep---- now for everyone.
Honors- for others.
AP- for the others.

This is certainly a type of tracking or ability grouping. It has also been my experience that the staff earn the right to teach these levels... usually by experience.... newer staff getting track one and working their way up...if you will.

Of course the 3 levels also carry different weights that help to calculate GPA- which has become an increaing competition in our schools. Another interesting question for your group: Should GPA be weighted?
Why?

I think the topic is of interest but once again it is tinkering with the system rather then really taking a deeper look at highschool reform or transformation.

In a nut shell.... the way most high schools are designed it is certainly easier for the teacher to do ability grouping. Most high schools schedules are driven by needing to get so many kids through the assembly line that you can certainly see why adults choose to group this way.

Under the current view of education: (see learn or we will hurt you thread) ability grouping makes perfect sense. Check out the other thread to see what your picture of schooling may look like.

Be well...... mike

[Katrin Oddleifson Robertson]

Hi Eric! How are you? I am just getting back into Ning after teaching a spring class at the U. I hope you are well and enjoying your summer.

What a great question - I hope you will get some responses....In my opinion, grouping is a good idea, but a student should never be tracked. In other words, the grouping criteria should constantly be changed up so that a student does not get labeled as "this"or "that". The grouping should be done according to what an individual might bring to the group for that particular lesson or unit. Perhaps a student can write well, or has a good reading voice and those skills are needed in a group situation. Or, perhaps it is a need based situation so students who are struggling with a particular book can meet and work on that together, but those students are not always tracked as "lower ability students". Basically, the criteria for grouping students should be multi-dimensional so that a students strengths can be highlighted as well as their weaknesses get supported....

Katie

[Connie Weber]

Hello Eric, Mike, Katie,

I'm glad this forum got reactivated. It's such a good question--thanks, Eric!

Mike, I agree with you that tracking, ability-grouping, differentiating may all be done to assist a factory-model of education, and that often it's just tinkering with the system rather than even looking at transformation of the system, morphing it into something quite else...

Katie, I like your idea of mixing things up a lot, shuffling things around so students get a variety of experiences. I think that's ideal. It's like when I play soccer: I get an entirely different experience out of it when I'm one of the "best" on the team than when I'm the "worst" on the team. I find both experiences to be valuable. I definitely don't want to be labeled, I just want to keep learning and playing. And in each context, if I were labeled, my label would have to shift constantly to be accurate, as I'm constantly shifting.

Yes, multi-dimensional criteria, that's the way of it. That's the way it should be. Strengths highlighted, weaknesses supported... Yes.

And going back to what's commonly used in elementary school: ability-grouping for subjects such as math and reading--well, in many ways that seems very limiting to me. The high-performing students will benefit from having to rethink what they "know" and through the process of interactively constructing their perspectives. The low-performing students will thrive with a variety of "levels" of understanding around them... and may make substantial leaps, like third world countries that skip all the intermediate technology and just arrive at a new place.

Another thing, in my 30 years of teaching I have plenty of examples of teachers who "called it wrong." I've seen teachers who weren't smart enough themselves to see that a student was brilliant in a subject, and then that student was treated in a way that wasn't supportive. The reason the students weren't recognized was because in their brilliance they asked some of the most essential, core, radical questions about the subject matter. And you know how core questions can appear "dumb" or naive. On the other side, some students that teachers think are brilliant are only very well-trained, precocious, in a particular groove that simply highlights a narrow form of intelligence (such as performing nice neat little memorized algorithms on paper in a kind of empty thinking, over and over again). I've seen those kids get only one facet of their learning emphasized, and lo and behold, in upper-elementary school they then hit a wall in learning that's much larger than it ever would have been if only they had gotten a more rounded perspective, a more rounded series of experiences.

Live and learn... Lots to consider. Thank you Eric, for opening up our wondering.

[Katrin Oddleifson Robertson]

Agree with everything that Connie has said. And, I have seen the devastating results on a child when, as Connie put it a teacher "Got it wrong". It can change the course of a child's life when a teacher misunderstands and that misunderstanding becomes a label that follows a child around...not just intellectually devastating, but socially and emotionally, too.

[Nancy Bosch]

Connie said:
"And going back to what's commonly used in elementary school: ability-grouping for subjects such as math and reading--well, in many ways that seems very limiting to me. The high-performing students will benefit from having to rethink what they "know" and through the process of interactively constructing their perspectives."

Gifted kids may need to "rethink" once---but they do not need to re-think 186 days a year. That's what's happening in many elementary classrooms around the country.

[Skip Zilla]

Three decades ago my beautiful, enthusiastic, fifth-grade-learner, daughter Katie came home from her second, then third day of a new school year crying and demoralized for the first time in her young life. When I asked her the trouble, she told me, "Dad, they're making me use the same books I finished last year." I immediately called the principal of her school, but could only arrange a meeting through his secretary for a meeting on Friday--two days hence--to find out what was going on. I told Katie to do her best in the next two days and that I would be speaking with her school's principal on Friday.

When I met with the principal and her teacher, I was told that they were attempting to reduce teacher workload in the school by limiting grouping as completely as they could. (As I learned later from my son's irate third-grade teacher in the same school, this was not exactly school policy, but my daughter's teacher's longstanding personal predilection and union right which her principal was honoring.) I responded to Katie's principal that she had been grouped in her previous school which she had attended on the other side of town, but in the same school district, before our family had moved into a new house about a half-mile away from his new school. When he told me that Katie was indeed using the same books and studying the same curriculum as she had last year, I was surprised by my ability to control my growing anger and not jump out of my chair, grab him by the collar, and lift him off the floor with a clenched hand at the end of my right arm! By some grace beyond my human limitations, I asked calmly instead, "How did she do last year in these subjects?"

Katie's principal looked into her file which he had brought to our meeting, found the paper on which the results were typed, and proceeded to tell me that my daughter, not only had done exceptionally outstanding work in class, but also tested grades ahead in the subjects in question on a standardized test given at the end of the year. I couldn't believe what I was hearing from him--Katie's teacher remained dumb throughout the meeting. On hearing his words, I felt a kind of ancient crisis-opportunity, twilight-zone moment. By some grace beyond me, I calmly and confidently told him that Katie would no longer be a student at the school starting on Monday, got up from my chair, thanked him for the meeting, and walked out of the room and the school.

I spent that evening and most of Saturday calling everyone I knew about a school in which I could immediately enroll Katie. Several friends and acquaintances advised me to consider Green Hedges School in Vienna, Virginia, and one my friends even had the home phone number of the head of the school. I proceeded to make one of the most important phone calls I've made in my life. To shorten this story, let me end it by saying that Katie started on Monday the next stage of her remarkable learning career at Green Hedges. I was lucky: I could afford the tuition (barely), and my daughter was spared an undeserved educational stasis and personal setback in her young life. (Incidentally, Katie's brother Christopher joined her in attending Green Hedges the next year--both thrived in an educational culture originally founded by the granddaughter of poet Joyce Kilmer; Christopher's wonderful third-grade teacher started her own independent school the next year, having run out of patience for incidents similar to Katie's of a school failing to responsibly serve its students' fundamental interests.)

My suspicion that schools often lose the welfare of students in a mix of other lesser determinants of what they do leads me to revulsion at the thought of how many parents are unable to act on behalf of their children--when they rightly should--and how many kids are diminished in spirit and lose the grit required to meet the personal challenges of learning robustly and optimisticall

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Skip,
This question has resurfaced at my college again, so I'm reflecting, by force, on it.
"Streaming" is the term I most remember - and the two things that most firmly sit with me is the claim that that the 'differently-gifted' will make better progress in a smaller group, better able to individualise learning - which I applaud, up to a point. The point is then reached when the school 'rewards' the good or experienced or powerful teacher with the 'top' class - and the newbie, inexperienced, powerless or bad teacher is consigned to the 'bottom' (and the bottom are consigned to them - it's a reciprocal abandonment often.
I think the case stands well for varied strands (and I'm in mind particularly of high school mathematics) as long as
-teachers are placed according to their giftings and loves
-the levels are actually relevant to the students capacities and interests (which means that different strands are not successive waterings down of the 'real' subject, but are actually fit and suited for the students. The 'watering down' approach usually means gutted and uninspiring)
-class sizes are actually weighted properly.

Unfortunately, that's not the usual way it goes - and the 'let's all just be a community' can be stultifying too. From personal experience, I believe serving a large grab-bag of classroom capacities requires educational genius or hard work or both of a level beyond most teachers. (It's certainly beyond my range and energy levels!)
That's a personal view, of course, shaped out of only 16+ years in junior classrooms teaching science, mathematics, physics, computer studies, information systems, applied computing, religious education and french.
Which, yet again, really points out how broken mass education is (in my local cultures at least). Or does it point out how empty of direction those local cultures are?
It's a time-worn debate, and that's because there isn't a simple implementable answer.
In general, I'm for creative (not dilutive) streaming although I don't know what that really looks like modernly - it certainly won't be the republishing of all the old SRA maths materials.

[Katrin Oddleifson Robertson]

I wonder if technology will help us break up the "mass" part of public education and help students and teachers become more "individually" focused. I think that we need to redesign and reconceptualize the whole structure of schooling rather than trying to prop up a system that is clearly not working. I don't know exactly how that could look, but is seems time. Take a look as the ASCD issue involving restructuring High Schools...pretty compelling stuff in there.

Skip, thanks for taking the time to describe yours and your daughter's journey. As you and Connie are so skillifully putting it, it can be the gifted students that get left behind as well as the struggling students when we fail to look, individually, at who we are teaching...

[Nancy Bosch]

I, too, saw lots of promise using technology to differentiate in the elementary classroom but in my large suburban district it's not happening. I bet my social networks will be glad when I retire in the next year or two so I'll stop whining!! haha. N

[Skip Zilla]

There are already in use in business the technologies for tracking automatically customer preferences and for creating individualized profiles of Web usage and "personality." The political/moral will and public/private funding necessary to subject students to the tracking of all their learning/development activities over their educational careers by sophisticated, interventionless, and intelligent online technologies may be all that remain as obstacles to a brave new world of educational mentoring, guidance, performance assessment, etc. The prospect scares the hell out of me, though, knowing the darker side of authoritarian control of social power in human history.

[Nancy Bosch]

Skip, I assuming your Katie is in her late twenties or early thirties--IMHO things have not changed much for bright kids in their regular classrooms and NCLB is making things worse!! I think you and I discussed gifted ed ad naseum a year or so in this forum (smile)---this spring from my gifted pullout program I lost two of my brightest students to private school and one to homeschooling.

BTW, I went to high school in Vienna. N.