The concept of tracking is one I have been familiar
with all my life, I am a product of being tracked through my entire K-12
career. But I never had a face with the
name until this week and I’m still not a fan of it. Below are my top three experiences with tracking
from a teacher’s point of view:
1.
Bottom 25% Village
I once had an administrator say she was going
to create a “village” for the lowest performing 25% of freshmen and sophomores.
o It is well known that low-performing students
are usually trapped in a draining cycle of poor academics, low motivation, and
even worse behavior. The students who would be members of the village would be
isolated from the rest of the school. As has been seen with
tracking, it is typically minorities, and low socioeconomic students who are
stuck in the bottom of their school’s data (Oakes, n.d.).
What wasn’t discussed in Oakes’ article was how
teachers view being assigned to the low-level students. Just as the kids lack ambition so do the
teachers. Why would a teacher want to
spend 90-minutes a day teaching Shakespeare to a group of students who haven’t mastered
middle school level reading? If the teacher knows that she is going to spend most
of the classroom redirecting misbehavior why would she want this added stress
piled on to a demanding profession (Oakes)? Wouldn’t you feel like your talent was being
wasted by sitting on the bench?
2.
Magnet Program
To attract students to attend one of the
district’s low performing middle schools, the middle school became a magnet school. That school then decided to isolate the
magnet program students from the rest of the school – even giving them their
own lunch period to keep them away from the “other” students.
o Let’s face the harsh reality. If a school is trying to “attract” students
then it’s because the institution has a reputation of low-performance and
poorly behaved minority students. There’s
no problem with wanting to diversify a school, if it’s for the right
reasons. But when you import a cohort of
students solely because they should be better than the students already at the
school, and then you segregate them from the rest of the student population by
giving them their own lunch period and classes apart from the other
students? This is 2017 not 1957.
Why would you want to come to school if you
weren’t one of the chosen ones? Students who
are placed on a higher track tend to receive a better education, higher-quality
instruction, an enthusiastic teacher, and more opportunities in the future
(Oakes). Would you be happy if you came
to school to learn with a teacher who did not want to teach a class of the low
kids? Then you head-off to have lunch only after the privileged students had
theirs and were back in class receiving a more engaging education than you were
going to?
3. Rough Remediation
A remedial high school math class of more than 30 freshmen of which many of them lack English proficiency, low socioeconomic status, and have learning disabilities.
o You know you’re grouped in with the problem
kids. None one them like school and their
behavior shows it. You know the teacher doesn’t like your class and that other
teachers don’t like your type of class either.
Your class was created to get you out of the on-level class for the kids that
show promise (Oakes). You need extra help. You’ve never been good in math and neither have the students around you. While it may sound great in theory that the
teacher can focus her teaching on students of the similar level, a point that
was strongly made by Vivian Yee in
this article, but the teacher is of no help either. She has to juggle every students' needs, manage behavior, and make what you're learning interesting. You aren’t challenged, the worksheets are go over the same material you didn’t learn last year, and there’s
no reason to try when the leaders of the school don’t expect you to.
If you substitute the word tracking with the
phrase “separate but equal,” you will gain the attention of school leaders. Yee argues that mixed ability grouping does not work. Oakes argues that tracking does not either. So why not try the former? What do schools have to lose?
Even students are calling to end tracking.
If school leaders won’t listen to the research or professionals in
the school then maybe they will listen to the kids they serve. In his TED Talk, Salman Khan mentions that
the tools available on Khan Academy for teachers help them track student
progress. This form of tracking shows,
as Khan pointed out, that students who were lagging in math on one topic mastered
it and the next six topics shortly after (Khan, 2011). Progress and intelligence are dynamic and
fluid. If we must continue tracking
students based on ability then we must continually change their tracks as needed. With technology, the data used to inform
these decisions is instantaneous. Students
who stay on the same track and attend school while sitting idling by will quickly become unmotivated just as letting a car idle for too long on a
regular basis will quickly kill the engine.
In Emily Pilloton’s TED Talk she discussed how she
and her design team is helping to rejuvenate a burned out public high school as
well as the rural county it serves (Pilloton, 2010). The techniques used in design easily transfer
over to how curriculum can and should be delivered in the classroom. Not only just any classroom but a mixed
ability classroom. If Pilloton can teach
a design class to all different levels of students to help build a farmer’s
market in town, then teachers can use the same techniques to teach their
subject areas. For instance, designing a
classroom climate for mixed-ability leaners needs to be designed with the
students and as the students need it to be to benefit them (2010). Not only does this increase buy-in from
students, but students of all levels have a say-so in what they learn, how they
learn, and most importantly, that they are included in the same learning as
everyone else.
References
Khan, S.
(Writer). (2011, March). Let's
use video to reinvent education[Video file]. Retrieved July 22, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education#t-1262036
Oakes, J.
(n.d.). Keeping Track, Part 1: The Policy and Practice of Curriculum
Inequality. Eisenhower
National Clearinghouse. Retrieved from http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/drbob/Oakes.pdf
Pilloton, E.
(Writer). (2010, July). Teaching
Design for Change[Video file]. Retrieved July 22, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_pilloton_teaching_design_for_change#t-1044983
Marissa,
ReplyDeleteI am happy I came to your blog to read your post. It is ‘in your face’ insightful and provocative. I loved it!
I would be curious to hear more about your experiences being tracked through your K-12 career. I don’t remember being tracked before middle school for academics. I am also interested in your second sentence, which I am interpreting (hopefully correctly) that you didn’t have a word for what you experienced in your school career, the word being tracking. What word or words did you use for tracking prior to knowing that term? I am curious because I think it is powerful and interesting to hear people’s perspectives and experiences with tracking (with anything really) before the term is placed since the term carries a lot of baggage, passionate opinions, and honestly incorrect advertisement. In my post, I recalled an experience of my mom advocating for me to be put into a higher track for math. While I was reading about that experience, I was desperately trying to reverse the knowledge and strong opinions I have on tracking to remember what I used to think of tracking before I understood what it was. What were my raw experiences and opinions around it? It makes me want to do a video where we ask kids young enough to not have previous knowledge on tracking, what they think of the system of tracking. I am picturing videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TJxnYgP6D8 .
The article you linked is especially intriguing to me because it inadvertently raises some of the wonderings I made in my post about the fine line between what seems to be differentiation at the classroom level and tracking. Vivian Lee referred to what could be taken and what sometimes is differentiation as ability grouping. She talks about ability grouping as being “a close cousin” to tracking. This is where I get confused. Where is the line between differentiation and tracking at the classroom level? Tomlinson (this book, chapter 1: http://www.mccracken.kyschools.us/Downloads/CarolAnnTomlinson%20Differentiated_Classroom.pdf) gives an example eerily similar to ability grouping and says it is differentiation: “Mrs. Wiggins assigns students to spelling lists based on a pretest, not the assumption that all 3rd graders should work on List Three” (p. 1). Is that not an example of ability grouping? I know there are many options for differentiation and in fact Tomlinson’s figure on p. 15 was extremely helpful to my developing understanding of differentiation. Teachers can differentiate content, process, or product based on student’s readiness, interests, or learning profile. Ability grouping does feel like a type of differentiation specifically content differentiation based on student’s readiness. Readiness is the more PC word for ability, as Fran Schumer states. In practice, it seems to be interpreted in the same way. Depending on the implementation details, this type of differentiation seemingly can perpetuate the same evils of tracking such as the smart vs. not smart perception of students (which can sometimes be beneficial for a select minority, but detrimental for the rest).
Vivian Lee then discusses a teacher named Cathy Vail who uses this sort of differentiation in what seems like an effective way. Students are not pigeonholed into being a certain ability level, but rather students have areas of strength and areas of growth and may need different modes of instruction, instructional materials, and ways of assessment. This to me feels more like differentiation. Is this ability grouping? Vivian Lee says it is. I think I am partly against using the word ability grouping with this example because ability grouping, being a cousin to tracking, has a negative connotation and carries the stigma of smart vs. not smart. Was this example differentiation and not tracking because the groups were fluid? Or is this example just a watered down version of tracking because it is virtually impossible to have true fluidity, to be truly meeting the readiness level of all students, and to allow all students access to the same content, complexity included? I do wonder if differentiation not executed well or rather differentiation in the ability-grouping mode is in fact tracking. I then worry that the buzzword of differentiation has become, for some educators, tracking and that makes tracking feel okay, despite the research and anecdotal evidence that it isn’t. Lastly, this leads me to my final concern in that if ability grouping is becoming more common at the classroom level, that means we are essentially tracking at that level, but also at the system level and that is concerning.
DeleteThank you for your thought provoking post!
Julia
Hi Marissa,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post and the conversation it inspired! I enjoyed reading your post and the links you embedded.
I agree with Julia. I loved your "in your face" style here. The decision to use the term "village" for a bottom track is a bit scary, almost like Orwell, or perhaps even something worse. But your other two examples were equally compelling. They show pretty simply that no student wants to be in a low track and it is the rare teacher who wants to teach in it. There are probably ways that elementary teachers can ability group and not destroy kids' motivation and sense of self--in fact, they might improve skills. That seems less likely at the secondary level, as your examples show.
I think the Khan Academy dashboard that you mention is interesting. These student dashboards seem to be on the rise. I know we will start to use them with our teacher candidates next year, and I wouldn't be surprised that each k-12 student might eventually have an online profile/dashboard that each teacher can access and use.
I would argue that "keeping track" of students is not the same as tracking. The former might simply be assessments which inform future teaching.
But I wonder if that will turn out to be true. What happens when the results of an assessment or group of assessments gets entered into the dashboard? What is the purpose of a dashboard? Is it to better visualize where a student is compared to other students? Will we target learning based on where they are at? Is this a form of individualization that means some kids will never be exposed to more advanced content? This might make sense in math (where Khan is mostly working), where you could argue for the importance of sequence, but does it make sense in social studies? Should I not get to study the 1960s if I do poorly on the Civil War? That would seem preposterous. So I think your warnings about Khan have me really rethink what is going to happen with our dashboards.
What Pilloton did was turn education into a process of shared making, rather than individualistic consumption. That is a huge flipping of the script, one that can't be start to challenge tracking and ability-level grouping. If we actually require intelligent use of hands and hearts as well as our heads, then I think the question of academic tracks will be challenged as well.
Great post. I hope you have a great rest of the week,
Kyle