Alternatives to Tracking & Ability Grouping/Measures to Counter Its Negative Effects

• The Multiple Abilities Program (MAP), at the University of Alabama's College of Education, is designed to develop teachers who are knowledgeable and skilled enough to meet the needs of a wide range of students -- regardless of how they have been placed and/or labeled by the school system. Participants in this preservice program do not enroll in a traditional course-by-course professional education sequence. Instruction is not dominated by lectures, nor is assessment by paper and pencil. Rather, prospective teachers engage in a five-semester [2 academic years plus a summer term] curriculum designed to spiral so that they continuously develop competencies through an increasingly in-depth, integrated, and contexualized thematic approach. Approximately 50% of the program involves multiple, semester-long apprenticeships working with mentor teachers form tow school districts in special education settings, inclusive settings, and traditional elementary classroom settings. One of the special education apprenticeships settings is a summer program for gifted and talented students titled the Summer Enrichment Workshop.

• Making heterogeneous classrooms work requires a skillful combination of challenging content and a variety of learning strategies, so that diverse groups of students will be able to understand the content. Practices such as Socratic seminars, project-based-learning, and well-structure cooperative learning can help motivate students to become active participants in learning.

• In 1994, New York City began requiring all 9^th graders to take college-prep math and science courses, instead of the easier remedial courses such as "consumer math" that many lower performing students had been taking. Failure rates did go up slightly under the new directive, but thousands of additional students passed the college-prep courses--which were "gateway" courses to better educational opportunities--and the number of African American and Hispanic students passing them doubled in the first year.

• Edna Varner, principal of Chattanooga's Phoenix II middle school in Tennessee, is one of five in Chattanooga using the Paideia school model, first described in The Paideia Proposal by Mortimer Adler in 1982. The hallmark of Paideia schools is that students engage in in-depth discussions about their reading core curriculum texts in heterogeneous Socratic seminars. Readings include challenging news-magazine articles, literature, and other "real world" materials.

• Johns Hopkins University researchers have been piloting a model with success at Central East Middle school, Philadelphia's first "Talent Development School." At Central East, the Talent Development model combines two curricula that have produced higher achievement outcomes--a literature-based cooperative learning curriculum called Student Team Reading/Student Team Writing (STR/STW) and a core curriculum in mathematics based on the Chicago School Mathematics Project. In the Talent Development model, some students receive a "double dose" of certain courses so that no one falls behind. Central East's rising achievement scores show the power of combining such high-content curricula with extra support.

• At Louis Armstrong Middle School in Queens, New York, students who need extra help with math take extra math classes during elective periods, says Fran Curcio, a faculty member at New York University. Curcio, formerly on the faculty of Queens College, spent 10 years working with teachers at Louis Armstrong through a collaborative agreement between the college and the school district. Curcio notes that when lower ability students get the support they need to stay in class with more successful peers, "after a while the kinds of questions they ask start to sound like the questions the more successful students ask....It's not that they are parroting the more successful students. They're developing the same kinds of critical thinking skills, in part through collaboration with kids who are perhaps a bit further along."

Resources and Links:

The following is a list of selected organizations and/or resources that provide information.

Clearing House on Urban Education
Teachers College, Columbia University
Institute for Urban and Minority Education
Main Hall, Room 303, Box 40
525 West 120th Street
New York, NY 10027
(800) 601-4868
e-mail: eric-cue@columbia.edu

Miami Equity Associates, Inc. (Southeastern Desegregation Assistance Center)
8603 S. Dixie Highway, Suite 304
Miami, FL 33143
(305) 669-0114

Mid-Atlantic Laboratory for Student Success (Temple University)
Professor Margaret Wang
933 Ritter Annex
1301 Cecil B. Moore Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19122
Website: http://www.temple.edu/departments/LSS

National Paideia Center
University of North Carolina - School of Education
Campus Box 8045
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-8045
(919) 962-7379

Bibliography:

ASCD. Teaching Gifted Students in the Regular Classroom. An ASCD Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, March 21, 1997.

Braddock, J. H. Tracking: Implications for Student Race-Ethnic Groups. Report No. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students, 1990.

Brooks, Jacqueline Grennon and Martin G. Brooks. In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1993.

Cohen, Elizabeth. Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogenous Classroom. Columbus, OH: National Middle Schools Association., 1994.

Epstein, Joyce and Karen Clark Salinas. Promising Programs in the Middle Grades. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals, 1992.

"Getting Off the Beaten Track: Educators Say The Road to the Future Requires Moving Beyond Tracking." Multicultural Messenger. 1994: I, No. 6.

Kulick, J.A. Ability Grouping. Report to the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, Grant No. R206R00001, November 1991.

Lynn, Leon and Anne Wheelock. "Making Detracking Work". The Harvard Education Letter, Vol. XIII, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 1997).

National Governors Association. Ability Grouping and Tracking: Current Issues and Concerns. Washington, DC: National Governors Association, 1993.

NASSP. Effective Strategies for Teaching Gifted Students in Detracked Schools. An NASSP Middle Level Conference for Principals and School Teams, San Diego, CA: February 9-11, 1997.

Oakes, J. and Martin Lipton. "Detracking Schools: Early Lessons from the Field." Phi Delta Kappan, February 1992. pp. 448-454 .

Oakes, J. "Can Tracking Research Inform practice? Technical, normative, and political considerations." Educational Researcher (May 1992) pp. 12-21.

Oakes, J. Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Oakes, J. Multiplying Inequalities: The Effects of Race, Class, and Tracking on Opportunities to Learn Math and Science. Santa Monica: RAND, 1990.

Oakes, J., Gamoran, A., & Page, R. Curriculum differentiation: Opportunities, outcomes, and meanings. In P. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Curriculum (pp.570-608). New York: MacMillan, 1992.

Ross, Ann and Karen Olsen. The Way We Were ... The Way We CAN Be: a Vison for the Middle School through Integrated Thematic Instruction. Kent, WA: Susan Kovalik and Associates, 1995.

Schurr, Sandra L. Prescriptions for Success in Heterogenous Classrooms. National Middle Schools Association. Columbus, OH, 1995.

"Two Cities' Tracking and Within-School Segregation." Teachers College Record, No. 96 (1995), pp. 681-690.

Useem, E. Getting on the fast track in mathematics: School organizational influences on math track assignment. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the AERA, Boston, MA, April 16-20, 1990.

Veves, Michael "Beyond Tracking: A Teacher's View.". Equity and Choice, Vol. 6, No.1 (Fall 1989), pp. 18-22.

Welner, Kevin G. and Jeannie Oakes. "Ability Grouping: The New Susceptibility of School Tracking Systems to Legal Challenges." Harvard Educational Review; Vol. 66 No.3 (Fall 1996). pp. 451-70.