Blowing up the Tracks

...a girl named In-grid asks, referring to their once-a-week student teacher...

...Norward Roussell's curiosity got the best of him...

...Unless middle school principals take heroic measures like buying expensive software or crafting daily schedules by hand, it often becomes a lot easier to sort everybody by reading scores...

...We also have a vocabulary sheet, drawn from "The Tell-Tale Heart," containing words like audacity, dissimulation, sagacity, stealthy, anxiety, derision, agony, and supposition...

...What courses were they taking...

...Patricia Kean is a writer in New York City...

...Parent groups, school boards, teachers, and administrators who hold the power within schools cling to the myths and wax apocalyptic about the horrors of heterogeneity...

...Kids on top study together, kids in the middle console themselves by making fun of the "nerds" above and the "dummies" below, and kids on the bottom develop behavioral problems and get plenty of negative reinforcement...

...Oh, Keyboarding II, Earth Science, Consumer Math...

...To Roussell, their meaning was clear: Put black kids in the high tracks and we pull white kids out of the system...

...Jennifer P., a teacher in a Brooklyn elementary school saw a pattern in her class...

...A pleasant looking woman shouts over the din, "What's rule number one...

...It's easier to untrack when kids are closer to one another to begin with...

...What about that other one...

...H's syllables hangs in the air a second longer than necessary...

...Given the odds of finding a word like "ordinary" on the SAT's, the children of 7-16 have a better chance of standing before a "grand jury" than making it to college...

...What did we learn about the writer...

...It also demands that schools—and the rest of us —admit that some kids will be so disruptive or violent that a solution for dealing with them must be found outside of the regular public school system...

...But, the author says, urban schools continue to lag behind...

...It's easier for educators to tinker with programs and make cosmetic adjustments than it is to ask them to do what bureaucrats hate most: give up one method of doing things without having another to put in its place...

...Though some fashionably progressive schools have begun to reform, tracking persists...

...She thinks we're babies...

...Flying directly in the face of Yogi Berra's Rule Number One, it tells kids it's over before it's even begun...

...Like we don't know what railroad means...

...Parents of gifted and talented students staged a full-scale revolt against Roussell's subsequent efforts to establish logical standards for placement...

...That's where I discover that while their school may think they're dumb, these kids are anything but stupid...

...One of them, the Wildcat Academy, run by a non-profit group of the same name, v plans to enroll 150 students by the end of the year...

...There's nothing wrong with the "regular" class in this Harlem public school...

...My students, who differed widely in ability, interest, and background, nevertheless got Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Langston Hughes at the same pace, at the same time—and lived to tell the tale...

...Her question led to a discussion that turned into the best class I ever taught...

...It seems that being gifted and talented is hereditary after all, largely a matter of having parents who read to you, who take you to museums and concerts, and who know how to work the system...

...Since 1983, the number of Pioneer Valley seniors going on to higher education jumped from 37 to 80 percent...

...Some of the words they are expected to find difficult include popular, ranch, suitcase, arrested, recipe, tricky, ordinary, humorous, and grand jury...

...But time after time I watched my students climb out of whatever mental category I had put them in...

...A few years ago, Dr...

...He figures that if his PTA's happy, he's happy...

...That teacher," sniffs a pretty girl wearing lots of purple lipstick...

...Driven by standardized tests, the descendants of the old IQ tests, tracking has evolved into a kind of educational triage premised on the notion that only the least wounded can be saved...

...Placement is often a matter of who's connected...

...January/February 1993/The Washington Monthly 31 As I sit in the back of the classroom watching these two very different groups of seventh graders, my previous life as an English teacher allows me to make an educated guess and a chilling prediction...

...Rail (pauses) road...

...The majority-white school board chose not to renew his contract, and he's now superintendent in Macon County, Alabama, a district that is overwhelmingly black...

...Friendships form, attitudes harden...

...Trouble is, as they toil 32 The Washington Monthly/January/February 1993 over basic drill sheets, the sparrows are slipping farther behind...

...So by the time they're ready for first grade reading groups, certain six-year-olds have already been marked as "sparrows"—the low performers in the class...

...It's not even about placing more black and Latino kids in their midst, a kind of pre-K affirmative action...

...H. to fire the first question...

...New York City seems close to such a conclusion...

...No reply...

...In four days of public hearings, speaker after speaker said the same thing: We're going to lose a lot of our students to other schools...

...The principal put all the kids whose parents were in the PTA in the top tracks no matter what their scores were...

...Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez is moving forward with a voluntary "academy" program, planning separate schools designed to meet the needs of chronic troublemakers...

...Absolutely no looking at the book allowed...

...Talk to teachers about how their high track kids differ from their low track kids and most speak not of intelligence, but of motivation and "family...

...Schools that make the transition often achieve dramatic results...

...Districts in Florida and California are conducting similar experiments...

...They know they don't read well...

...Tracking is a system...

...Class 7-16 files slowly into the room, prodded by hard-faced men whose walkie-talkies crackle with static...

...Why are we studying this...

...For ultimately, tracking stunts the opportunity for growth, the one area in which all children are naturally gifted...

...One-time guidance counselor Hart learned this lesson more than a decade ago when she and two colleagues struggled to introduce a now-thriving college curriculum program at Los Angeles' Banning High...

...In the beginning, it doesn't seem to matter so much, because the other reading groups—the robins and the eagles—are just a few feet away and the class is together for most of the day...

...Though policies vary, by fourth grade many of these groups have flown into completely separate classrooms, turning an innocent three-tier reading system into three increasingly rigid academic tracks —honors, regular, and remedial—by middle school...

...He comes in and goes like this: Rail (pauses) road...

...A strange phenomenon occurs in inner city areas with large minority populations— high track classes shrink, and low track classes expand to fit humble expectations for the entire school population...

...The class takes out a vocabulary sheet...

...Even when minority children score high, they often find themselves placed in lower tracks where counselors and principals assume they belong...

...Rather, it's about raising expectations for everyone...

...Back track Tracking has been around since just after the turn of the century...

...Because tracking puts kids in boxes, keeps the lid on, and shifts responsibility for mediocrity and failure away from the schools themselves, there is little incentive to change a near-ly-century old tradition...

...untracking is a leap of faith...

...Meanwhile, regular kids move on to regular kindergartens where they too will be tested, and where it will be determined that some children need more help, perhaps a "pre-first grade" developmental year...

...Then, too, the low-track graduates of 70 years ago held a distinct advantage over their modern counterparts: If tracking prepared them for mindless jobs, at least those jobs existed...

...She writes on the board...

...Their survival came, in part, because my colleagues and I could decide if the cost of keeping a certain student around was too high and we had the option of sending him or her elsewhere if expulsion was warranted...

...Thirty minutes pass...

...That's not as quixotic as it sounds...

...The table breaks up laughing...

...Tracking is a system...

...When researcher Anne Wheelock interviewed students in Boston's public schools, they'd all insist they were going to become architects, teachers, and the like...

...Henry Jeopardy," a game which requires students to supply one-word answers to questions like: "O...

...Those who undertake the delicate process of untracking need nerves of steel and should be prepared to find resistance from every quarter, since, as Slavin notes, parents of high-achieving kids will fight this to the death...

...untracking is a leap of faith...

...Tracking, the practice of placing students in "ability groups" based on a host of ill-defined criteria— everything from test scores to behavior to how much of a fuss a mother can be counted on to make—encourages even well-meaning teachers and administrators to turn out generation after generation of self-fulfilling prophecies...

...And far from being held back by their "regular" and "irregular" counterparts, straight-A students were more likely to be challenged by questions they would never dream of asking...

...In fact, it's long been standard practice in the nation's Catholic schools, a system so backward it's actually progressive...

...Along the way, the practice resegregates the nation's schools, dividing the middle from the lower classes, white from black and brown...

...Over time, slow kids get slower, while those in the middle and in the so-called "gifted and talented" top tracks fail to gain from isolation...

...Change is taking place in areas like Wellesley, Massachusetts and Jericho, Long Island...

...These kids know they're no Einsteins," Mrs...

...Find the word on the page...

...By the twenties, the scientific principles that ruled the factory floor had been applied to the classroom...

...When difficult kids can no longer be dumped in low tracks, new ways must be found to deal with disruptive behavior: early intervention, intensive work with families, and lots of tutoring...

...When he looked for answers in the files of high school students, he discovered that a surprising number of low track minority kids had actually scored higher than their white top track counterparts...

...With the courts reluctant to get involved, even when tracking leads to racial segregation and at least the appearance of civil rights violations, changing the system becomes an arduous local battle fought school by school...

...Doors to college are slamming shut, though the kids themselves are often the last to know...

...We're talking about unequal distribution of reform," Wheelock declares...

...H. is teaching the first group, otherwise known as the "slow kids," as though they are fourth graders, and the second, the honors group, as though they are high school freshmen...

...Each of Mrs...

...Wildcat kids will attend classes from nine to five, wear uniforms, hold part-time jobs, and be matched with mentors from professional fields...

...This would be junior year and I'd ask, 'Are you taking Algebra?' and they'd say no...

...Tracking sees to it that they never get that chance...

...The robins are gathering more challenging vocabulary words, and the eagles soaring on to critical thinking skills...

...Bells ring, doors slam...

...As the evidence piles up, everyone from the Carnegie Corporation to the National Governors Association has called for change...

...Once the offspring of the brightest and the best connected have been skimmed off in honors or regular tracks, low tracks begin to fill up with children whose parents are not likely to complain...

...That, as Wheelock notes, is "political suicide...

...In fact, the entire class seems to be conducted at 16 RPM...

...Though Edgar Allan Poe ends up sounding a lot like Jerry Lee Lewis—a booze-hound who married his 13-year-old cousin—these kids speak confidently, in paragraphs...

...The result was that my honor students wrote elegant essays and made it to Ivy League schools, right on schedule...

...This way I can go really slowly with them...

...It was then, as cities teemed with immigrants and industry, that education reformers like John Franklin Bobbitt began to argue that the school and the factory shared a common mission, to "work up the raw material into that finished product for which it was best adapted...

...She talks so slow...

...Moving away from tracking is not about taking away from the gifted and talented and giving to the poor...

...Yet when the classroom operates like a battleground, society's casualties mount, and the results begin to seem absurd: Kids who enter school needing more get less, while the already enriched get, well, enricher...

...Or, as Slavin puts it: "You can maintain your tracking system...

...Rule number two seems to be an unwritten law: Speak slowly...

...But high expectations for Ebony and her new friends bring tangible rewards like a weekly field trip and music and computer lessons...

...As Selma, Alabama's first black school superintendent, he couldn't help but notice that "gifted and talented" tracks were nearly lily white in a district that was 70 percent black...

...a big-haired girl snapping gum in the back of the room wondered aloud one day...

...Rule One: Sit down...

...The work of researchers like Jeannie Oakes of UCLA and Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins has proven that tracking does not merely reflect differences—it causes them...

...Paperbacks of Poe smack sharply on desks, notebooks rustle, and kids lean forward expectantly, waiting for Mrs...

...Research is research," the principal told me that day, "This is practice...

...With his grades, however, young Albert would probably be hanging right here with the rest of lunch table 7-16...

...Outside the walls of schools across the country, it's slowly become an open secret that enforced homogeneity benefits no one...

...It's also easier for educators to tinker with programs and make cosmetic adjustments than it is to ask them to do what bureaucrats hate most: give up one method of doing things without having another to put in its place...

...With the best of intentions, Mrs...

...Just put everyone into the top track...

...Their efforts to open top-track classes to all students prompted death threats from an unlikely source—their fellow teachers...

...They believed the IQ test— which had just become popular—allowed pure science, not the whims of birth or class, to determine whether a child received the type of education appropriate for a future manager or a future laborer...

...Kids wander about the room aimlessly...

...Untracking may also entail new instructional techniques like cooperative group learning and peer tutoring, but what it really demands is flexibility and improvisation...

...True to its name, Pioneer Valley Regional school in Northfield, Massachusetts was one of the first in the nation to untrack...

...Henry moved from North Carolina to what state—Andy...

...More blacks and more low-income whites did make it to the top under the new criteria, but Roussell himself was left behind...

...Books come out gradually...

...In Paula Hart's travels for The Achievement Council, a Los Angeles-based educational advocacy group, she comes across district after district where black and Latino kids score in the 75th percentile for math, yet never quite make it into Algebra I, the classic gatekeeper course...

...It hasn't quite worked out that way...

...Black marks A funny thing can happen to minority students on the way to being tracked...

...By high school, many low-track students are locked out of what Jeannie Oakes calls "gatekeeper courses," the science, math, and foreign language classes that hold the key to life after twelfth grade...

...So kids who do well on reading tests can land in the high track for math, science, social studies, even lunch, and move together as a self-contained unit all day...

...Hands shoot into the air...

...H. said of her low-track class when we sat together in the teacher's lounge...

...When I taught in an untracked parochial high school, one size fit all—with the exception of the few we expelled for poor grades or behavior...

...She takes a year to do anything...

...These kids get less homework, spend less class time learning, and are often taught by the least experienced teachers, because avoiding them can become a reward for seniority in a profession where perks are few...

...Race and class divisions usually play themselves out in a more subtle fashion...

...The sifting and winnowing starts as early as pre-K...

...Three-year old Ebony and her classmates have won the highly prized "gifted and talented" label after enduring a battery of IQ and psychological tests...

...On their side is the most potent force known to man: bureaucratic inertia...

...Twelve minutes into class, we settle down and begin to play "O...

...Off track betting Anne Wheelock's new book, Crossing the Tracks, tells the stories of schools that have successfully unpacked or never tracked at all...

...In four years, I never saw a single standardized test score...

...Class 7-1 marches in unescorted, mindful of rule number one...