Tracking: Why Schools Need to Take Another Route By Jeannie Oakes

Argument and Quotes

This author argues that tracking students by ability only benefits gifted and " higher students" but is damaging to students performing in the middle and lower areas in school. When students are stereotyped as being " less able" she says, they have fewer opportunities to learn. The students in the higher groups are exposed to more critical thinking and problem solving skills, the author argues. These are skills that need to be developed in all groups I believe, and are more important than memorization of random facts. One thing in the article that really stuck out for me was how she said that teachers of low ability classes are more likely to use ridicule and strong criticism than high ability teachers. This really bothers me, if this is true. It does in my opinion make for self fulfilling prophecies. The author says that " without a positive classroom climate students spend considerable energy interfering with the teachers agenda, and teachers must spend more of their time and energy just trying to maintain control." Given this it seems that creating this positive classroom environment would be beneficial to teachers as well as students. A very significant quote in this article was " It seems that tracking is both a response to significant differences among students and an ongoing contribution to those differences." I agree with this, tracking just accentuates the differences in students and does nothing to help them in my opinion. Another quote from the article is that " Unless teachers and administrators believe and expect all students to learn well, they will be unlikely to create school and classroom conditions where students believe in their own ability and exert the effort it takes to succeed." 
          In discussing alternatives to tracking the author explains the importance of a curriculum that is rich in content and related to real life. Active learning tasks are better than passive ones. Real world problems should be used which are no doubt more relate-able to all students than something they cannot imagine. All students benefit, I think , from working with students of varying levels. I have worked in a special education preschool classroom for many years and I have seen this work there. The special education students are mixed with typically developing peers for all activities. The peers learn important skills like patience and tolerance as well as the important lesson that there are many differences in people and they should be celebrated. The children with disabilities learn a great deal from the peers and everyone is part of the group, no one is better just different. If these programs work so well at the preschool level, I can not imagine why they would not work with older students.
          Another important point that is mentioned in the article is in regard to poor and minority students. These students are placed in low-ability groups much more often. Below is the link to an interesting article about schools in Seattle that made an effort to dismantle tracking in their schools and some of the results. They did this in an effort to reduce the racial achievement gaps there.

https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/an-effort-to-raise-achievement-by-dismantling-de-facto-segregation/ 

The Question that I would want to talk about is how teachers can change the grouping by ability and differentiate instruction ? It seems like a huge challenge to me for them to have the time and resources to do this even if they really want to.