For many years there has been a heated debate over whether or not to track students. After reading several articles I have come to the following conclusions:
1. Tracking is beneficial to higher level students when they have a strong peer group to build relationships with through out their schooling.
2. Tracking has only negative affects if students are ability grouped and those ability groups cause students to be shuffled to low income and low achieving schools.
What I found interesting is that the trends are moving towards allowing high achieving students to be accelerated into high levels thus reducing the need for grouping. If students are allowed to accelerate into higher grade levels slowly by taking a few college classes at the high school level, a few high school classes at the middle school level, and then preschool before moving them up to kindergarten early there is greater success.
The biggest issue is making sure that students are moved as a peer group so that they can have a support group to work with until they become comfortable in their surroundings. This also cuts down on their undervaluing of their own self-worth.
For students of low-income and ability the issue is the fact that they are shuttled into schools and classes that receive less aid therefore they do not get the best materials or teaching. That is not to say that all low-income students are underachieving but it is harder to be recognized because there is a great number of students at this income level thus less time is spent testing or analyzing these scores. It has been shown however that lower ability tracked classrooms who have dedicated teachers can achieve high test scores if their teacher develops the curriculum for the class. Teachers that adjust the curriculum individually for lower ability students tend to show the most progress with those students.
I still agree with the concept of tracking and I know that I am in a minority these days but I feel that students who are given a chance to excel in homogeneous grouping will allow for better teaching and learning opportunities.
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Kelley, I almost took this as my issue this week because I was curious about what current literature says about tracking. I think tracking at the elementary level is a bit much. I think it is trickier to do. I think when you get to the middle and high school levels, tracking is a bit easier to do. I know that the middle school and high school I went to tracked people. In high school, if you took honors English your freshman year, you took it every year. If you took regular English your freshman year, you took that every year. You couldn't really get out of your track.
ReplyDeleteI think tracking is beneficial in these instances if all of the children are still receiving a HIGH quality education for their ability level. Often though the teachers who are teaching the toughest and lowest students are the new teachers, while the experienced teachers are teaching the highest level students. I think that is what is backwards in tracking students into ability levels. Shouldn't your most experienced teachers be working with the hardest students? It takes 5 years to really know what you are doing as a teacher. I feel bad sometimes for the 2 classes that I have had already and what I didn't know that I didn't do well with them. Why are we having these same teachers teach the students who really need the help the most?
I will stop now. Like you, I agree with tracking, only when it is done right. But how do you police that?