TracKing

Different groups of students are often exposed to different curriculums. This entry concerns the process by which students are sorted into these groups, based on factors such as educators' judgments of those students' intellectual abilities, past achievement, or potential for future accomplishments. Once students are sorted, curriculum and instruction are differentiated between classrooms. Terms used to describe these sorting practices include ability grouping, tracking, leveling, streaming, and homogeneous grouping.

Some researchers and educators have drawn distinctions between the first two terms, usually labeling as tracked those systems that place students at a given level across subject areas and labeling as ability grouped those systems that group students class-by-class. But the day-to-day reality is virtually the same for most students in schools approximating either definition. In fact, similar patterns of enrollment and learning emerge in choice-based tracking systems.

A National Research Council report recently recommended all tracking be eliminated, recommending instead strategies that ensure appropriately challenging instruction for students of varying skill levels. This and other authoritative detracking recommendations arise out of tracking's long record as an obstacle to effective classroom instruction.

The historical emergence of tracking coincided with the immigration waves of the early 20th century. Tracking was grounded in racist, classist, and paternalistic beliefs about these immigrants and others. The practice was embraced as an efficient and scientific method to provide members of this newly heterogeneous student body with schooling appropriate to each group's academic capacity and future station in life. Today, tracking's defenders are more apt to speak in terms of readiness, although efficiency arguments also remain common. In theory, the process of tracking children is supposed to facilitate learning by separating them into groups, so that they are taught alongside peers of similar ability and apart from those with higher or lower abilities. In practice, however, even those researchers who favor tracking as a theory generally acknowledge that it lacks consistency, effectiveness, and equity.

Implementation's tension with theory is evident, for instance, in the actual homogeneity of tracked classrooms. Students with an extraordinarily wide range of ability or achievement levelsas measured by standardized testsare grouped together within any given class. This is because enrollment criteria include (whether formally or informally) not just test scores and prior school achievement but also student behavior, student or parent preference, completion of prerequisites, teacher judgment, and counselor guidance. The resulting classes tend to be stratified by race and class. Disproportionate placement of African American and Latino students in low-track classes, and the corresponding exclusion of these students from high-track classes, has been found to occur beyond any effect attributable to prior measured achievement.

Early judgments about the students' capacities persist throughout their school careers. Placements, once made, tend to take on a life of their own. Lower-tracked students are caught in a downward spiral. Their education fails to prepare them in knowledge and skills, and their transcripts reflect missing prerequisites for more advanced courses. Labels become fixed, internally for students themselves and externally for teachers, counselors, and other students. Students enrolled in low tracks tend to immediately fall behind their high-track counterparts, and the achievement gap increases over subsequent years. This lack of effectiveness partly results from the difficulties teachers face when trying to make low-track classes academically engaging and challenging.

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