Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Ability Grouping

Ability grouping refers to the organizing of elementary and secondary students into classrooms or courses for instruction according to actual or purported ability. This entry briefly reviews the history of ability grouping in American public education and how the law has treated challenges to this practice in various types of settings, primarily when such grouping results in significant levels of segregation or discrimination based on race. Legal constraints on ability grouping based on language, disability, and gender are also identified. The entry concludes with a review of policy features that may help predict the legal vulnerability of ability grouping practices and of factors that school officials may find important to consider as they contemplate grouping students to foster excellence without sacrificing equity in the current era of accountability fostered by the No Child Left Behind Act (2001).

Historical Perspective

Grouping students by ability for purposes of instruction has been a source of debate in American public education almost since the inception of the practice in the late 1860s. Over the past 140 years, ability grouping has experienced various levels of support and adoption. In the first quarter of the 20th century, for instance, ability grouping experienced a rise in popularity that coincided with the universal schooling movement and the introduction of intelligence testing and scientific management strategies into public education. This period of growth was followed by a decline in popularity during the 1930s and 1940s, as the progressive education movement questioned not only the effectiveness of grouping but also its appropriateness in a democratic society. However, by the late 1950s, ability grouping experienced a resurgence in the post-Sputnik era as the nation rallied to match the technological accomplishments of the Russians.

It was during this same period, of course, that Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) triggered a revolution in race and schooling policy in America, a revolution that was intended to bring White and Black students together in common educational settings, notwithstanding the grossly different educational opportunities each group had been afforded historically and the widely held stereotypes regarding their relative academic abilities. Ability grouping expanded dramatically through the 1960s, coming to represent a means of circumventing desegregation by substituting within-school segregation for what had existed between schools at the time of Brown. From at least this historical juncture, race and grouping practices have been inescapably intertwined. Research findings during the post-Brown period, including Jeannie Oakes's influential study, Keeping Track, have confirmed not only that ability grouping tends to segregate students along racial and socioeco-nomic lines but also that those channeled into lower classes are frequently provided a substantially different curriculum and set of learning experiences-thereby locking in lifelong inequality. Like many other educational controversies over the past half century, the issue of student grouping has been almost as likely to be tested in the courtroom as in the classroom.

Legal Challenges and Parameters

Tracking, an extreme form of ability grouping, first gained legal attention in a case challenging the practice in the District of Columbia Schools, where students were assigned to one of four tracks from college prep to basic education and completed virtually all their course work within such a differentiated curriculum. Black students disproportionately were relegated to the lowest of these tracks. Evidence also indicated that once assigned to a track, students were not re-evaluated on a regular basis and rarely enjoyed mobility to a higher track, even though the school district justified the use of tracking as a means of remedying student deficiencies. In Hobson v. Hansen, affirmed under the name Smuck v. Hobson (1969), the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that ability grouping as it was practiced in the D.C. Schools violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution