CROSSING THE TRACKS:
How "Untracking" Can Save America's Schools


by
Anne Wheelock

The New Press
1992

email address: wheelock@shore.net

[NOTE: Anne Wheelock, author of Crossing the Tracks, has granted MiddleWeb permission to post the Introduction to her 1992 exploration of "detracking." Readers are free to print the Introduction for their own use. To order a copy of Crossing the Tracks, place your order through a bookstore or on-line service like Amazon.com.]



INTRODUCTION

To the Editor:

I think tracking is a good idea. Advanced students should be permitted to enter an advanced placement class, rather than be forced to remain in a class where other students are failing or getting low grades.

-- Jeffrey Genovese,
Allston, Massachusetts,
Boston Globe,
February 7, 1991.


Dear Jeff:

My name is Amy Pelletier, and I am a first year student at Mount Holyoke College. I was in homogeneously grouped classes in seventh grade and changed to heterogeneously grouped classes (at Pioneer Valley Regional School in Northfield, Massachusetts) in eighth grade. When the transition was first made, I did not really understand what was happening, and therefore saw little change. Then I began to notice that there were different students in all my classes. I was no longer "stuck" in the "high-level" rotation where I saw the same people all the time. By the time I graduated, I knew all the people in my class, not just their names, but something about them.

There was also a change in the style of teaching. Much more work was done in groups, rather than lecture. As a result, teachers were able to work more one-on-one with students. With this, students learned to be responsible to each other, not just to the teacher. I remember one particular project which required that our group read a short story, come up with a script, and make a movie. While I had no problem writing the dialogue, I did not know where to start in making the video. Luckily, the others in my group (from the "lower" levels) were very creative and knowledgeable when it came to acting, recording, and film editing. It is in these groups where people realized and learned to respect everyone's interests and talents.

Many people are worried about the effects of heterogeneous grouping on the "upper" levels, fearing that the "lower" level students will hold them back. I can honestly say I don't feel I was held back by any other student. After the transition, I did not see a change in the challenge of the class work. If a student was having difficulties, there were always alternative ways for the teacher to approach the subject. For example, in my senior English class we read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One student was having trouble getting through the book, and he was given the cassette matching the story, which allowed him to keep up with the class and participate in discussions.

Another example is from my senior year physics class where there were many different levels ranging from the top 5 percent of my class to the lower quarter. Our teacher combined mathematical problems and book learning with many hands-on activities. These projects included a rubber band race car contest and an egg drop contest. Ironically enough, the "lower" levels were far more successful than the "upper" level students in these assignments which applied our book knowledge to real life.

I recall that in the debate on the change to heterogeneous grouping, many "upper" level students were afraid of becoming bored in their classes. However, I did not experience this. I believe this is where teachers must become more flexible in assignments, allowing students to do independent or extra work if they so desire. In my school, the opportunity for independent study is readily available and open to all students who find they have a particular interest and want to pursue it further.

Independent projects provide opportunity for students to study more in depth, while fostering responsibility, creativity, and motivation. Another concern is that the "upper" level student will have problems being accepted at top colleges and universities. I have not seen this to be true, however, since students from my class and the class before me are currently attending Georgetown University, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, University of Vermont, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others.

I feel there is a great deal of discrimination among students grouped homogeneously. Not only do the "upper" level students look down on those in "lower" levels, but the "lower" students have many stereotypes for those in higher levels. These stereotypes are unfair since the level where students are placed is often determined by a standardized test which does not truly measure their capabilities. Heterogeneous grouping, on the other hand, lessens this discrimination by allowing students to interact with each other about these preconceived notions.

I believe that heterogeneous grouping is also more realistic in the long run. For example, colleges or universities generally run on a heterogeneous system, where people sign up for the classes they are interested in. On a broader scale, life in the "real world" involves dealing with people who are not at the same level as you. Therefore, I feel that heterogeneous grouping does not disadvantage any student academically, and the social and psychological gains are tremendous.

I hope that these thoughts have helped you dispel some fears about mixed level grouping. Your worries are not uncommon; many students and parents experience them when there is discussion of this type of structural change. I wish you well and hope that you find the change as advantageous as I have.

Sincerely,
Amy Pelletier,
May 2, 1991

From Tracking to Untracking: A Paradigm Shift

American is rife with talk of school reform. Growing expectations that schools will educate all students at increasingly high levels pose new challenges for educators, and many are responding by reorganizing school routines and practices heretofore considered "givens." Among those practices are tracking and ability grouping.

What is tracking? Tracking involves the categorizing of students according to particular measures of intelligence into distinct groups for purposes of teaching and learning. Once sorted and classified, students are provided with curriculum and instruction deemed suited to their ability and matched to spoken or unspoken assessments of each student's future. Yet as research has dramatically demonstrated, this practice has created as many problems as it was designed to solve.

Schools across the country are beginning to switch
from practices that result in unequal access to knowledge
to superior approaches designed to provide equal
educational opportunity for all students.
We call this process "untracking."

Tracking does not result in the equal and equitable distribution of effective schooling among all students. Instead, tracking allocates the most valuable school experiences -- including challenging and meaningful curriculum, engaging instruction, and high teacher expectations -- to students who already have the greatest academic, economic, and social advantages, while students who face the greatest struggles in school and in life receive a more impoverished curriculum based on lower expectations for their capacity to learn.

Over time students assigned to the lower levels move so much more slowly than those at the higher levels that differences that may have been real but not profound in the earlier grades become gigantic gaps in achievement, attitude, and self-esteem. Furthermore, the sorting of students into groups of "haves" and "have-nots" contradicts American values of schools as democratic communities of learners which offer equal educational opportunity to all.

In light of growing awareness of the real costs of tracking and greater familiarity with heterogeneous classroom methodologies, schools across the country are beginning to switch from practices that result in unequal access to knowledge to superior approaches designed to provide equal educational opportunity for all students. We call this process "untracking." This book is about some of many schools, mostly at the middle level, that have begun this process. We call these schools "untracking schools."

"Untracking" schools are schools that are replacing the grouping of students by ability for purposes of instruction with mixed-ability grouping. These schools make these grouping changes in tandem with changes in curriculum, teaching approaches, and assessment strategies designed to strengthen learning for more diverse groups of students. These schools also adopt school routines and structures redesigned to extend expectations for success to all students and foster a strong sense of the school as a community of learners. Moving into uncharted territory, untracking schools create new conditions for learning and teaching and, in the process, redefine their own character in relation to a commitment to discover and nurture genius in all their students.

As schools venture into the largely unmapped terrain of heterogeneous grouping, they encounter the challenging questions of public education: What is our mission? What do we want all our students to know when they leave our school? How are our grouping practices compatible with our mission and goals? What are the values that will guide us in developing alternatives? What kinds of curriculum and instruction can enhance new grouping practices? How will we assess student progress? How can we introduce change without sacrificing our best practices? How will we explain our changes to all the constituencies who have a stake in our school? As schools come up with their own answers to these questions, the new practices they adopt reflect a shift in the norms that underlie their daily routines.

While each school, in the process of untracking, begins to claim its uniqueness, untracking schools also share characteristics in common including a new emphasis on:

What gives these schools their distinct personalities is how they make these shifts, the strategies they adopt, and the accommodations they make along the way, all of which reflect the different contexts in which they find themselves.


The Scope of Tracking in Public Schools

"In every school I've visited, there is a clearly delineated 'top,' 'middle,' and 'bottom' group. There is an across-the-board comfort with the notion of ability grouping, and it dictates the critical process of aligning youngsters with instructional experiences and with one another. In almost every classroom I've visited, the teacher has given me a fairly direct signal as to how fast or slow, how gifted or average, or how facile or struggling the group is -- and what effect this has on depth, pacing, and other instructional considerations."

-- Peter Buttenwiesser, "Notes from the field," for the Ford Foundation, 1985.

Tracking and its various modifications have been accepted features in the country's schools for nearly a century. Coming into use at a time when schools were enrolling growing numbers of immigrant children, tracking was adopted as a legitimate means of sorting those children viewed as having limited preparation or capacity for schooling from native children.

By the 1920s, some schools had developed up to eight distinctly labeled tracks -- Classical, Arts, Engineering, Academic, Normal, Commercial Business, Commercial Secretarial, and General -- each representing particular curricular programs that in turn reflected an assessment of students' probable social and vocational futures. And as Buttenwieser, representing the Ford Foundation on visits to nearly 100 secondary schools across the country, found, few high schools even considered tracking worthy of mention for reform as recently as 1985.

Tradition, convenience, and lack of compelling alternatives
are no longer adequate reasons to maintain tracking and
ability grouping practices. In the 1990s, we know that
tracking is both harmful and unnecessary.

Tracking and ability grouping also characterize the organization of classrooms for even younger students. Approximately two-thirds of the principals of middle level schools surveyed by Jomills Henry Braddock II in 1990 reported the use of whole-class grouping by ability in at least some academic subjects, and one out of five reported such grouping in all subjects. Braddock's survey also revealed that in all subjects but reading, whole-class ability grouping increased as students moved from fifth through ninth grade. These findings complement those of John Lounsbury and Donald Clark who, in a 1990 study of over 1000 eighth grade classrooms, found that eighth graders are almost invariably grouped homogeneously for at least part of their school day, with 89 percent of the classrooms observed using some form of ability grouping.

In most schools, these practices are both well-intentioned and convenient. Even educators who doubt the value of tracking are frequently unfamiliar with practices that work effectively with heterogeneously grouped classes. However, tradition, convenience, and lack of compelling alternatives are no longer adequate reasons to maintain tracking and ability grouping practices. In the 1990s, we know that tracking is both harmful and unnecessary. New grouping, curriculum, and instructional practices that are more compatible with the democratic philosophy of American society must feature in any agenda for meaningful school reform.

Negative Effects of Tracking

Despite public awareness of the disappointing performance levels of American students, the ways in which daily school routines contribute to underachievement are often dismissed as trifling. In fact, the unequal distribution of the favorable conditions that make learning possible virtually institutionalizes unequal achievement patterns among students.

This imbalance allocates advantageous experiences disproportionately to those students already favored by race and class, beginning with curriculum offered students at different levels. In some school districts, for example, entire schools constitute a "high track" where a disproportionately white, middle class student body has access to a curriculum that offers their students solid preparation for post-secondary education.

At the same time, other schools in the same district may offer a mostly minority student body a comparatively remedial curriculum. In many districts, course enrollment patterns inside individual schools replicate this pattern, with poor, African-American, Latino, and recent immigrant students largely absent from courses providing access to the higher level knowledge needed for educational success and broadened life opportunities. In contrast, these students are often found in disproportionate numbers in the lower level courses of the "general" or "vocational" curriculum.

At the middle level, patterns of race and class segregation and the differences in curriculum offered different groups are obvious by the eighth grade. According to data compiled by the National Educational Longitudinal Study of Eighth Graders in 1988 (NELS:88), African-American, Latino, Native American, and low-income eighth graders are twice as likely as white or upper-income eighth graders to be in remedial math courses. Not only do students in remedial settings receive a less demanding curriculum; their teachers are also more likely to be less experienced in the classroom. For example, researcher Lorraine McDonnell and her colleagues found that teachers in 42 percent of the remedial, vocational, and general mathematics sections have been teaching for five years or less, compared with 19 percent of the pre-algebra and Algebra 1 sections.

Inequalities in learning conditions extend to other aspects of school life. As Jonathan Kozol has documented in Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, students who face enormous hurdles of poverty and discrimination in their personal lives also attend schools that are intellectually and physically inhospitable places for learning. In these schools, textbooks and library resources are woefully inadequate, virtually ensuring that many students will not master grade-level material regardless of their effort or ability. The absence of modern learning tools such as computers further cripples student achievement. In this context of "scarce resources," poor schools may be forced into allocating advantages according to their estimation of which students are "most deserving," institutionalizing greater opportunity for some while leaving others to manage without.

Kozol notes that the "restructuring" efforts of the 1980s have scarcely taken hold in these impoverished schools where, in comparison with their middle class counterparts, poor students have limited exposure to cutting-edge classroom practices which nurture success. While schools in well-to-do districts may implement a conceptual curriculum based on inquiry, simulations, research activities, technology-assisted instruction, and authentic school-level decision-making, schools in poorer districts often remain isolated from state-of-the-art school improvment efforts. These disparities further situate poor schools on the remedial margins of public education.

By the same token, the antiquated practices that often characterize remedial settings further undermine achievement. One of the most harmful of these is grade retention. While research has powerfully documented that repeating a grade at any level rarely promotes achievement and frequently contributes to student disengagement and dropping out, the practice is widespread, especially for poor children.

According to NELS 88, by the time American students reach the end of eighth grade, nearly one out of five has repeated a grade; however, more than one out of three students from low-income families has experienced at least one retention. Once retained, students are increasingly vulnerable to placement at a lower level or in special education. Mary Lee Smith and Lorrie Shepard in Flunking Grades, for example, have noted strong correlations between the use of grade retention and high rates of special education placement.

Calls for "reforms" like longer school days or greater standardization of curriculum will not have much impact on learning until harmful practices inside schools themselves change. Students need reforms that alter the quality of relationships, curriculum, and instruction in every classroom. Untracking, with its emphasis on enriching all students' intellectual and social experiences in schools, is a critical strategy for addressing issues of quality in education.

Specific Problems with Tracking Young Adolescents

"To truly reform middle level education, we must get down to brass tacks; start from zero; put aside our assumptions.... The only givens should be our knowledge of the nature and needs of early adolescents, the principles of learning, and the tenets and needs of our democratic society."

-- John Lounsbury
Young adolescents are at a unique stage of development. Students from fifth grade through ninth grade are growing at a pace that is as rapid as the growth they experienced between birth and age three. Their development is multi-faceted and dramatic and involves not only physical maturation but also social, emotional, and intellectual growth. These changes are erratic and individualized: Students enrolled in pre-algebra may also still enjoy playing with Legos or having a stuffed toy in bed with them, and students who lack confidence in basic academic skills may, nonetheless, be developing an increasingly sophisticated social awareness.

Tracking practices sharply contradict patterns of intellectual development of young adolescents. For example, the placement of students in settings that emphasize rote memorization over critical thinking occurs despite research demonstrating that thinking is not inherently beyond the capacities of young adolescents. As Lounsbury and Clark have noted, most eighth graders can: However, many students are rarely given the opportunity to develop these intellectual capacities. Based on their observations of eighth grade classrooms, Lounsbury and Clark conclude that despite rhetoric to the contrary, many classroom activities still focus on worksheets, test-taking, listening, and copying, while relatively few engage students in solving problems, manipulating data, or investigating real-life situations that develop complex thinking. They note further that in these classrooms, "students seem distanced from their own learning." Not surprisingly, then, according to NELS 88, nearly 50 percent of eighth graders report that they are bored at school half or most of the time!

Diverse patterns of development in early adolescence argue for educational practice that opens rather than closes doors and encourages rather than discourages intellectual and social exploration. Even if homogeneity were desirable, the rapid rate of adolescent development makes creating a truly homogeneous group of young adolescents a virtual impossibility, even for one year!

Recognition of early adolescence as a life stage characterized by diversity of pace and kinds of growth underscores the benefits of heterogeneous grouping at the middle level. But the current status of America's young people suggests even more poignant reasons for eliminating tracking at the middle level. In 1990, the National Commission on the Role of the School and the Community in Improving Adolescent Health proclaimed that "for the first time in the history of this country, young people are less healthy and less prepared to take their places in society than were their parents."

In CODE BLUE: Uniting for Healthier Youth, the Commission documented serious symptoms of alienation among young people related to school failure, violence, and substance abuse in the context of changing social conditions. The Commission found many adolescents' lives characterized by: As CODE BLUE makes clear, students in the 1990s need schools that offer more, not less, of a sense of belonging and more, not less, positive contact with adults who can act as a "good parent." Sudents need more, not fewer, opportunities to sort out the conflicting, often violent, messages of the mass media, and they need more, not less, protection from prejudice and dehumanizing living conditions. In short, students need schools that help them cope successfully with shaky social circumstances and that are nurturing communities of learners which teach the essential skills and knowledge for a healthy life.

Untracking is a major strategy to create schools that can be such places for all students.

Alternatives to Tracking: New Tools and Assumptions

Increased awareness about the harm of tracking in and of itself has not been enough to bring about change. Nor have well-publicized findings of students' academic and social needs provoked systemic reform. What schools have needed and what they have now are new ways of organizing curriculum and instruction so that all students can learn appropriate "grade-level" material in mixed-ability groups. New practices have demonstrated, for example, that:
Today schools also know more about the nature of human intelligence itself. While no one would be foolish enough to claim individuals enter life with identical abilities, intelligence is not fixed forever at birth. Human beings can become intelligent and can learn intelligent behavior, and what students learn depends to a great extent not on an "I.Q. factor" but on learning environments that equip them to use their intelligence as life-long learners, citizens, parents, and workers.

Moreover, intelligence grows as students are challenged to apply learning in settings where they interact with others who have different strengths from their own. Schools and classrooms which include diverse learners and employ the instruction and curriculum that makes mixed-ability grouping work represent such settings.

A Changing Economy, Demographics, and Tracking

"The modern employee must be more highly educated, better informed, more flexible than ever before. He or she must be, because what we're paying for is the ability to think, to solve problems, to make informed judgments, to distinguish between right and wrong, to discern the proper course of action in situations and circumstances that are necessarily ambiguous."

-- David Kearns, Xerox Corporation
The American economic and social landscape is changing. Increasingly, decision-makers are acknowledging the connection between a healthy economy and a solid education system. While an educated labor force does not in and of itself assure economic growth, many agree that the economy of the future must be founded on a high-skill, high-wage working population. In addition, the United States economy now operates as part of a global economy with business and industry acting both in competition and cooperation with institutions from Asian and Pacific Rim countries and a unified European Community.

More workers of the future will come from the fast-growing population groups that are making up a larger proportion of the school-age population -- African-American, Latino, immigrant, Asian, and Native American children. According to many economic forecasters, by the year 2000, 85 percent of all new entrants to the labor force will either come from these groups or be female. Many will be called upon to perform work oriented more to providing services, often of a technical nature, than producing goods. These economic and demographic shifts together highlight new directions needed for reforming schools.

No longer can schools train only selected students as decision-makers or assume that students who have learned to follow directions and perform basic skills are adequately prepared for the future. No longer can schools conclude that most students will never be called on to interact with others to create solutions to complex problems. Given rapid technological change, young people entering the labor force now need skills that go beyond those that prepare them for one specific job slot. They need an education that prepares them to be life-long learners. And as the American population becomes increasingly heterogeneous, schools must nurture a greater appreciation for diversity among all students.

In the future, whatever form the economy takes, high levels of educational attainment will provide an advantage in life. At the same time, the outlook for those with high school diplomas or less will diminish. By implication, then, schools must assume that all students will at some time in their lives seek post-secondary education as a route to greater opportunity. In this changing social context, public schools must assure the public that all students, not just "the best," are prepared to take advantage of future opportunities.

As the implications of changing social conditions become clear, and as more constituencies clamour for school accountability, tracking becomes more difficult to justify. Tracked schools, particularly those that relegate students most in need of expanded opportunity to levels that offer the least, fail to meet either the needs of changing social and economic conditions or pressures for accountability.

Tracking As A Public Policy Issue

"As a country we need to realize the long-term results of tracking. Then we must commit ourselves to educate all students. Only a change in philosophy of education -- away from the factory model -- can bring about needed results. Our country will not survive in its present form with anything less."

-- Launa Ellison, Clara Barton Open School, Minneapolis
Given more precise understanding about the nature of human intelligence and the wider availability of alternatives to tracking, it becomes clear that tracking in public schools has less to do with ability than we have supposed. At the same time, what is apparent is that tracking has everything to do with opportunity. And the ways in which our institutions, including our public schools, structure opportunity is a matter for public discussion, debate, and policy.

Thinking about tracking raises fundamental questions: What constitutes an adequate education? Education for what? Education for whom? How can schools become places that offer a meaningful education to all students? These questions get to the heart of public policy.

Since 1954, the United States has made significant strides in opening the schoolhouse door to many children who were excluded from educational opportunities prior to that time. Public laws on both federal and state levels now affirm that all children have a right to a free, adequate, and appropriate public education. But when we begin to examine the opportunities we offer our children once they enter that schoolhouse door, and when we begin to look at how these opportunities differ according to race and economic status, we begin to see that, for all our best intentions, we have not gone far enough.

Fully realizing the promise of equal educational opportunity requires taking steps to eliminate practices that divide students into categories of "more able" or "less able" learners and that provide unequal access to knowledge. Untracking must begin before students reach the high school level; when schools follow a set of practices which deny pre-high school students access to critical gate-keeping knowledge that fail to push students to master material necessary for success in subsequent years, they virtually bar young people from future opportunities that can significantly improve their chances to flourish in life.

Untracking requires abandoning a strategy that sorts students according to individual weakness in favor of one that groups students for collective strength. It requires a shift from nurturing the ability of some children to cultivating effort, persistence, and pride in work in all children. It requires moving from a mindset that defines good education as a scarce resource, with the "best" reserved for the most "deserving," to one that envisions a society in which good education is abundant enough for all. Untracking necessarily provokes a reconsideration of the purposes of education. In this information age, a democratic society cannot survive the unequal distribution of knowledge. In an era when knowledge is truly power, a redistribution of knowledge is both fair and necessary.

Ultimately, reform of tracking practices in America's schools must be sustained by the conviction that education in a democracy rests on purposes that extend beyond the goal of grooming children for their future participation in the labor market. In a democratic society, schools are moral institutions, and their purposes must include helping students to become good people. An education worthy of the name must first nurture students' full potential for participation as citizens in the human community. As schools adopt more equitable grouping practices out of a commitment to these values, they fulfill their historical responsibility not only to help individuals improve their lots in life but also to strengthen the foundation for more just, inclusive, democratic, and productive communities.

Toward More Democratic Education for All

"Most governments have been based on the denial of equal rights; ours began by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious. We propose to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together."

-- Abraham Lincoln, 1858.
This book is a celebration of the capacity of schools to make significant changes in the most fundamental of school routines, the grouping of students for purposes of instruction. It is an appreciation of the principals and teachers, students, school board members, and other citizens who are carrying forth a vision of schools in which all students are learning in a heterogeneous setting. It is a recognition of the enormous energy, creativity, resourcefulness, and persistence of schools taking the first steps toward dismantling tracking and ability grouping practices that have outlived their usefulness in our schools and communities.

In undertaking to provide equal access to knowledge to all students, the schools in this book pursue educational goals that are truly "homegrown" American. In light of what these schools have accomplished, the quest for some abstract notion of "world class standards" becomes irrelevant. Were we to extend to all children in America opportunities to learn equal to those offered in these schools, we would meet our own highest expectations for learning, and our classroom standards would far surpass those established anywhere in the world.

These schools have taken on one of the most serious and
persistent of problems -- unequal access to knowledge -- and have devised solutions that renew and invigorate learning
for everyone in their classrooms.

By attending to the stories these schools tell, policy makers would not have to resort to comparisons with other countries to stimulate chanue. The inspiration for reform lies in our own backyard. This book is grounded in schools' first-hand experiences with reform, observations of effective classrooms that are heterogeneously grouped, and visits to schools striving to help all students achieve by providing all students with equal access to a meaningful curriculum.

These schools' stories form a stark contrast to tales of doom and gloom about American schools and suggest that reports of the death of public education in the United States are truly premature. These schools have taken on one of the most serious and persistent of problems -- unequal access to knowledge -- and have devised solutions that renew and invigorate learning for everyone in their classrooms.

This book looks at some of these solutions, beginning with an overview of the components of successful untracking in schools and districts. Subsequent chapters revisit and explore these components in greater depth through the experiences of specific schools. These chapters also highlight innovative practices in parent involvement, reform of school culture, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and counseling, which together and separately support untracking to improve learning for all students.

Anne Wheelock
wheelock@shore.net
Boston, Massachusetts, USA


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