I complain a lot about New York City's public education system. I do this in the context of someone who spent all 13 years of their education in that system, someone from a family that has been going to some of the same schools for generations (My great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother all went to the same high school. My grandfather, mother, my sisters and I all went to the same elementary school). I know a fair deal about the changes that this system has undergone in the last few decades from various anecdotes about what my mother learned in school (she started elementary school in the early 1970s), to what I learned (starting in 1995), to what my middle sister does now (going into 4th grade in 2010). We've watched the changes in structure and expectations of learning.
One of the things that I have a tendency to yell often and loudly about is tracking. When I was in elementary school, the schools were still tracking. I went through school with almost the exact same set of kids for the first 5 years of education (well, starting in 1st grade). I then went to middle school with many of the same kids, plus kids from another school district and I continued to be tracked. This system worked for me. I was a fast learner who went to schools that didn't have gifted programs. I was almost always bored. But without tracking I knew I would be even more frustrated. I could at least be certain that my classmates would pick up the topic eventually, even if it took them another few days. And in the meantime, I would read my book. Additionally, I knew I could be assured of having a few friends in my class every year. As a kid with poor social skills and only a few friends, who was often the subject of bullying by my classmates, I couldn't afford to be unmoored from my support system of friends.
My middle sister hasn't been tracked. Our elementary school has changed to a system in which instead of tracking, kids are grouped within their classes by ability, but the classes are mixed. My sister is clearly a different kid than I was and she likes this system. But she also doesn't much care for school in general and has friends in many different grades (I never knew a single kid in another grade until basically high school, with maybe 2 exceptions outside of church friends). She is social and a quick learner, but not as quick as I was/am. I don't know what it looks like to be taught in that structure, but I do have a certain understanding of how kids self group. In middle school, I was put into an ability grouping within my honors class, with three other high performing students. We did the same work, but at a different level because of our internal community and our sense that we were more able. There aren't enough kids doing the same thing for some of the kids in my sister's class for that to happen (this past year, the highest reading group was only 2 kids).
What has me thinking about this again is this article. If you're going to mix ability groupings, why not mix ages? I regret that I do not come from an educational background where I was not permitted or pushed to skip a grade or two, because, as the article highlights, kids learning at higher levels also often socialize with older kids because they have more in common with them. Particularly age groupings created through a multi-year educational programs that allow kids to finish them in the time it takes - a three year program that kids can finish in 2,3, or 4 years for example. If you're going to break kids down, why not create larger units of kids prepared for a skill across ages, rather than limit them to small ability grouping within ages?
Okay, so this is still tracking. But it allows for a different kind of social integration and is more fine tuned. When you're creating leveled classes like the structure I was educated in, there is still going to be a wide ability range. You only have so many kids to choose from, to make it happen. This seems so much more finely tuned to children's learning needs. Teach them when they're ready. Readiness is a predictor of success in so many ways. It keeps the slower learners from being discouraged the faster learners from being held back. There is only so fast my sister can move in a class of mixed ability. There was only so fast I could move in a tracked setting, even if I was allowed to be taught things faster or earlier as a class. But it seems like ability grouping would be more flexible in allowing children to move through them at their own pace, so that readiness might change the group structure, but not impede the growth of the child.
Could you explain a little more how your tracking system worked? Was your class determined by your tracking group?
ReplyDeleteI spent K-6 in a public school, where there was a Gifted Support program that I tested into fairly early in my school career. For 7th and 8th grade, I went to a parent cooperative school where we were divided into groups, not grades: Jane/Fran's group, Bobbi's group, Nancy's group, Lisa's group, and the three junior high groups. Fran (and later Jane) taught roughly kindergarten and first grade, Bobbi taught first and second, Nancy somewhere between second and fourth, Lisa fourth and fifth . . . and then the junior highers (there were more of us) split up more-or-less randomly (so far as I could tell) into three groups. And your group was your age-cohort, more or less, your homeroom, where you would spend 'group time' once or twice a week, and a lot of care was taken to ensure that different ages worked together-- not just contiguous groups, but junior high with Fran's and Nancy's group.
There was also a fairly fluid system of ability groups for different subjects, so you might be in Doug's reading group and Liz's Cool Stuff With Permutations math class. And people would move between ability groups as they were ready, without any sort of qualitative rank put on which group you were in-- I think that it helped that they weren't identified by level, but by name. Grades were preserved, but there was flexibility in the system-- my seventh grade year there was an Algebra II class for most of the eighth graders, because they'd all done Algebra I the year before, but my eighth grade year there wasn't, because most of us had come to the school in seventh grade and been put in the Cool Stuff With Permutations math class along with most of the sixth graders. Looking back on it, I realize that there must have been some incredible feats of scheduling going on behind the scenes (the younger groups mostly had a system of math is such-and-such time, reading after, whatever, but junior high had specialized teachers and did more of a rotation thing), but we didn't notice. And I don't claim that it could work at a larger school (there were maybe 95 kids when I attended there). But if I make it sound idyllic -- that's how I experienced it, especially after the way my public school experience had really crashed and burned by my sixth grade year.