Tracking in Public Schools

Promoting legal discrimination or exceptional education?


Since gaining public notice in the 1920s, debates over tracking’s fairness and efficiency have divided American school districts, law makers, teachers, and parents. Proponents of the practice insist gifted students thrive academically in homogeneous ability groups, while some researchers maintain low-track students suffer socially and intellectually. Though scholarly studies substantiating both sides exist, schools are turning to alternative methods of instruction more frequently than in the past.

Students are tracked most often in middle and high school. The term, generally interchangeable with ability grouping, refers to placing children into courses reflecting their prior learning. Most often, students are grouped into advanced, vocational, or general tracks. Grade level does not determine which classes students take. Whether students take honors or remedial classes they will graduate with the same diploma as their peers, providing their school and state requirements are met. The tracks reflect not only students’ intellectual ability, but also their career aspirations after completing high school.

Most U.S. schools stratify students according to ability beginning in fifth grade. Recommendations from teachers and guidance counselors coupled with standardized tests scores designate track placement. Predominately tracked subjects include foreign languages, math, English, science, and social studies. White middle class kids dominate the upper tracks. African American and Latino children are more likely to be low-track students, as are kids from impoverished backgrounds. Schools mimic society’s class system. Astonishingly, few students ever leave their original track placement in favor of a higher one. Replicating the rules of society, schools prove the American Dream doesn’t come true for everybody. Unfortunately, students pick up on track disparities early.

Lower-track students feel inferior to higher-track ones, like they are ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’ in comparison to their peers. Some students say that they feel unvalued by teachers. My father graduated from high school almost 30 years ago, but he still is embarrassed to admit he attended BOCES for occupational training instead of college. Though he’s a business owner and has restored classic cars that grace the pages of magazines, I remember him telling my sister and me, “I was stupid for not going to college. Nobody respects people who don’t go, no matter what they do. You’re going, no matter what.”

Of course, some students benefit from tracking. The integration of ability grouping into the classroom allows children to further build their strengths and receive appropriate help regarding academic weaknesses. Gifted students benefit from more challenging curriculums; they don’t have to spend weeks on the same subject, but instead progress through more material and faster than their average or below average peers. They have more free time to study topics of special interest to them because there’s less need to prepare for state mandated tests. Students of lower-ability placed in a class with others at the same level, work at the pace they set, and are given more time to digest information. However, students in separate tracks have few opportunities to interact during the school day; integration of abilities often only happens during gym class, sports, club activities, or dances. Because of such segregation, students don’t get to know all their classmates, just those deemed their intellectual equals.

Though Peter D. Rosenstien, the executive director of the National Association of Gifted Children, fears that it’s become “politically correct to deny that there are different potentials among children,” detracking into cooperative learning is on the rise. An alternative to tracking, the method purposely sorts children into mixed-ability classrooms. Students work together to help and instruct each other, with far less teacher intervention than traditional methods. Classroom desks are in groups, not rows, and posters and student projects flank the walls. Students are actively engaged in learning, and multiple intelligences are respected. Children aren’t only expected to learn the teacher’s curriculum material, but a hidden agenda set forth by the students. Students should learn how to be good friends, team players, and responsible for themselves, but also for the welfare of their peers.

Stephanie Freese of Interlaken, NY agrees that tracking creates injustice in the classroom. A senior at Wells College and mother of two young daughters, Freese says “I do not believe in tracking. I think tracking encourages teachers to treat students differently.”

Stephanie’s children attend South Seneca Elementary School. “Starting in fourth grade,” she says, “students are divided based on academic ability in reading and math classes.” Her oldest, Jesa, struggles with math and began fourth grade in “Group 4,” or the lowest ability group. According to Freese, “the methods the teacher used didn’t work well for many of the kids. Her strategy was to teach the kids tips and tricks to get through instead of teaching them the right way to get the answer.”

Stephanie intervened when mid-way through the year Jesa was still struggling, getting her daughter moved up to the next highest group for the third marking period. “She did much better, but was still half a step behind the others in her class.” For the fourth marking period, Jesa was placed in Group 1, the highest-level group, accomplishing to switch tracks, something not many students achieve. “She did amazing,” Stephanie says.

Freese “personally thinks that if a teacher is good, and puts forth the effort, all students can learn in the same class.” She acknowledges that for inclusion to be possible, the teacher may have to “make slight modifications to make [the class] more manageable.” Teachers can tailor assignments to the individual needs of her students, still challenging them and drawing on their potential.

Teacher attitudes have tremendous affect upon students, which is either detrimental or inspirational; Stephanie says, “The lower level math teacher didn’t believe her kids were capable of doing the same math as other groups, so that is how she taught them…I believe in educating teachers and preparing them to be able to teach a variety of different learning styles and ability levels at the same time, so that all the students have the opportunity to learn equally.”

No matter student’s ability, all children are capable of learning in the same classroom; one special education teacher remarked to me that students learn best from each other, no matter how much one-on-one time they accumulate with an adult.

However, tracking’s benefits will continue to be held in society’s high esteem. Emma Dailey, a junior at Wells and Secondary Education minor, says she “wouldn’t be here” without tracking.
“Because of high-ability grouping, I took AP classes that prepared me for college work.” Advance placement classes also attract admissions counselors’ attention.

Tracking and cooperative learning, while at different ends of the instructional stratification spectrum, aim at providing kids with an education that will positively supplement their lives. No matter how administrators require students learn, teachers wield the power to make any education an extraordinary one by reassuring children of their individual value inside and out of the classroom.

For more information about the tracking and ability grouping debate, visit the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation online.

Image found through Google image search, taken from http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/events/oldsite/bhm/bhm2004/images/school.gif.